One thing I’ve been learning through my MBA program has stuck with me: the need to ask the right questions and say the right things as a business owner. The basis of all my decisions comes back to the words I say to myself and communicate to my employees. This is showcased in a quote that Oscar Wilde once said:
“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
What he was getting at here speaks directly to how we perceive our own insight. Highly intelligent people often say things like “I used to think…”, “That’s a good point,” or “Let me reconsider.” In other words, people who are comfortable updating their beliefs when new information appears. Business owners who don’t tie their identity to always being right.
Saying “Let me reconsider” is truly the smartest thing we can say! Updating what we think, based on new learning and varied evidence we take in, can be the difference between our businesses failing or succeeding.
This idea feels especially relevant in our digital businesses. As creators, we make many early decisions about what our business is, who it serves, and what products we think people might want. These assumptions can quietly become part of our business brand identity and, therefore, very hard to change.
I’ve seen creators hold onto ideas long after the data suggests otherwise, continuing to push a product that isn’t resonating or sticking with a content strategy that isn’t leading anywhere. In fact, I’ve even done this at times and seen businesses failing because of it!
After I sold my first physical product business, I was missing the process of creating content. I decided to launch a portfolio blog business where I’d manage writing teams for a handful of sites. This idea was based on all my past knowledge of the internet and creator economy. At its height, I owned and managed 10 growing sites. In the midst of this massive investment in content build-out, Google came along and changed the game on us all with their Helpful Content Update and various other algorithm changes, including the introduction of AI search results. Everyone in the blogging community was hit hard by all of this, and thousands of livelihoods were affected.
Now that we are a couple of years past all this fallout, I am noticing that the sites that have stood the test of time have been run by owners who were willing to say, “Data has changed, perhaps I need to update my ideas as well.” Owners who were willing to go back to the drawing board and redesign a business with the new landscape and information.
Sometimes the smartest move isn’t doubling down. It’s stepping back and saying,
“I used to think this was the path, but the evidence is showing me something different.”
Are we willing to do this as business owners? Especially when we have sunk so much cost into learning how to create for a specific algorithm, or invested into a plan that has worked for many years. Through my own successes and failures, I’ve come to see this as one of the most valuable skills for building a digital business: treating being wrong like data, not like failure.
When a product doesn’t sell, when a post format falls flat, or when an idea we loved doesn’t land with our audience, that information is incredibly useful. Instead of protecting the original idea, we can ask better questions: What am I missing? This curiosity is what leads to better products and stronger businesses.
If you want to try this mindset shift yourself, here’s a simple exercise I suggest. Take a few minutes and write down three sentences that start with:
- “I used to think.”
- “Let me reconsider.”
- “What if (insert new data/belief here) is true?”
For example, I used to think my audience came to me for recipes. Let me reconsider if a printable product would be the best first launch. What if Instagram changes are true and won’t always be my main traffic source? Then ask yourself what the data actually says now.
If you’d like me to walk you through how this could change and help your business specifically, pop your email in this form, and I’ll send you a short training I’ve created based on this idea.
Often, the biggest breakthroughs in our creative business don’t come from pushing harder on the same idea. They come from the moment we are willing to say, “I’ve changed my mind.” And according to creators like Oscar Wilde, this might actually be one of the best measures of intelligence.
– Victoria