“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Wayne Gretzky

A great quote to live by.

But here’s the part we tend to forget:

Most shots miss.

That is true in business, creative work and almost anything worth pursuing. Good work gets rejected. Strong pitches go unanswered. Smart ideas fail to land.

Success usually requires far more attempts than wins.

So take the shot. Then learn enough from the miss to make the next one better.

SUCCESS STORIES COME WITH THE MISSES REMOVED

We usually encounter successful people after the awkward footage has been edited out.

We see the company once it has found its market, the artist after the breakthrough and the entrepreneur once years of improvisation have been renamed strategy.

Before the Beatles became the Beatles, they spent long stretches performing in Hamburg clubs. During one 1961 residency, they reportedly played 92 nights and accumulated more than 500 hours onstage.

Those hours did not guarantee greatness. They gave the band hundreds of opportunities to become better before the larger opportunities arrived.

Picasso provides another extreme example. He produced thousands of works across paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, ceramics and other forms during a career defined by constant experimentation.

We remember Guernica.

We spend considerably less time thinking about the mountain of work surrounding it.

That is one of the distortions created by success. The exceptional result survives. The experiments, repetitions, wrong turns and work nobody particularly cared about disappear into the background.

I have been noticing the same pattern in several podcasts and interviews I’ve checked out recently.

On Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom, content creator Jet described posting 1,062 videos before reaching his first 1,000 followers.

The following month, he reached 100,000.

Those first thousand-plus videos are the interesting part.

He was not merely buying lottery tickets. He was learning what worked, getting better on camera, receiving feedback and producing enough material to discover things he could never have figured out while sitting around devising the perfect content strategy.

Williamson had his own version.

Modern Wisdom took roughly 400 episodes and more than three years to reach 100,000 subscribers. Over approximately the next 400 episodes, it grew to around 3 million.

Everybody wants the second 400.

The first 400 built the person capable of producing them.

And those early years were not particularly glamorous.

Williamson recalls days in 2018 when the podcast received zero plays. After rupturing his Achilles, he built a recording setup that allowed him to keep interviewing guests with his injured leg elevated. After moving to Austin, while people invited him out, he would sometimes stay home late recording fresh sponsor reads instead.

He estimates that before dynamic insertion simplified the process, he recorded roughly 2,000 ad reads across 600 episodes.

Nobody sees that when they discover the successful podcast years later.

That is how success gets compressed.

The breakthrough gets a headline. The groundwork gets a sentence.

Williamson also repeated an observation during the conversation that captures the absurdity nicely: before you win, people wonder why you are working so hard. Once you win, they tell you how lucky you were.

Luck matters. It simply has more opportunities to find you when you are still taking shots.

WHEN I WAS FINDING MY WAY

When I started Webcopy+, I had years of corporate communications experience behind me, but limited experience building a business.

So I experimented.

I offered companies a free sample rewrite. Almost nobody responded.

I sent direct mail. It generated mostly silence and postage costs.

I attended networking events, tried different forms of outreach and chased opportunities that looked promising until “let’s circle back” became their final resting place.

I was learning who valued what I did, where those people could be found and how to explain the value clearly enough for someone to hire me.

Then an IT firm working with AT&T brought me in to rescue a project.

The content had already been rejected three times and was on the verge of being put on hold indefinitely. On Friday morning, I agreed to deliver new work by Monday.

Later that day, I learned the executive presentation had been moved to Saturday at 8 a.m.

I finished around 6 a.m., showered, threw on a suit, drove for an hour and walked into the presentation.

The executives approved the work.

The company president offered me a job.

I declined and continued building Webcopy+.

What stayed with me was not the all-nighter or even the job offer. It was that I happened to be in circulation when a meaningful opportunity appeared, and I had enough experience behind me to deliver when Monday suddenly became Saturday morning.

You cannot schedule that kind of opportunity.

You can create more chances to encounter one.

MORE SHOTS CAN MAKE YOU A BETTER SHOOTER

Taking more shots does not merely increase the probability that one eventually goes in.

Taking the shots can make you better at shooting.

Williamson made an excellent point about wanting the big opportunity too soon.

By the time he first appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he had already recorded roughly 600 episodes. Looking back, he believes getting that opportunity much earlier might actually have hurt him. He would have arrived with the skill of someone who had recorded only a fraction of those conversations.

The hundreds of earlier episodes had accumulated into capability.

We tend to imagine preparation happening before the opportunity.

Often, the attempts are the preparation.

A sales call teaches you something another sales book cannot. A rejected pitch changes the next pitch. An awkward presentation improves the next presentation. The hundredth article contains lessons that were unavailable when you wrote the tenth.

You cannot rehearse your way into all of that experience.

Eventually, the real world has to start teaching you.

YOU WILL NOT KNOW WHICH ONE

Music made this impossible for me to ignore.

I have written and collaborated on hundreds of songs and pitched songs tens of thousands of times.

Most pitches were rejected or unanswered. Collaborations stalled. Releases came out and went virtually unnoticed.

That same volume has also helped produce international collaborations, releases with major and respected labels, chart positions, millions of streams, a DJ network that grew from roughly 60 people to more than 3,000, and my acceptance as a Voting Member of the Recording Academy.

And I still regularly misjudge which songs will connect.

When we released a song called Freedom, I thought it was average.

It went on to chart internationally and generate more than 20 million views across Instagram Reels.

Had I only released the songs I thought were obvious winners, Freedom might still be sitting on my hard drive.

That uncertainty matters.

You cannot reliably predict which introduction will matter, which prospect will say yes, which article will travel or which creative idea will connect with thousands of people.

That does not mean lowering your standards and spraying mediocre work into the universe.

It means creating enough good work for success to have options.

THE NOS ARE PART OF THE MATH

Years ago, Canadian business adviser Mark Wardell introduced me to a useful way of approaching growth: start with the desired result and work backward.

Suppose you want to generate $200,000 in annual revenue.

If your average project is worth $10,000, you need 20 projects.

If you close one in four qualified opportunities, you need 80 qualified opportunities.

If one in five meaningful conversations produces a qualified opportunity, you need 400 conversations.

The numbers will differ dramatically by business. The principle does not.

Revenue goals eventually need to become activity goals.

Otherwise, it is remarkably easy to set an ambitious target while maintaining a level of activity that could never reasonably produce it.

That is not ambition.

It is decorative arithmetic.

Working backward also changes the meaning of rejection.

If historical evidence tells you that one out of four qualified opportunities becomes a client, three nos are not necessarily proof that something has gone horribly wrong.

They may simply be part of the math required to reach the yes.

Rejection feels different once it has a denominator.

A MISS IS DATA, NOT A VERDICT

There is an important catch.

Doing something 1,000 times does not guarantee you become good at it.

Entrepreneurs routinely make enormous decisions from tiny samples. Six unanswered emails become proof that outreach is dead. Two quiet LinkedIn posts establish that the audience does not care. Four declined proposals apparently determine what an entire market is willing to pay.

Perhaps the conclusion is right.

But the evidence may not be large enough to know.

Was the channel wrong, or was the message weak? Was the price too high, or was the value poorly explained? Did people dislike the offer, or did hardly anyone suitable see it?

A 2019 Nature study examined repeated attempts involving NIH grant applications, startup ventures and other high-risk pursuits. The researchers found that persistence alone did not separate eventual winners from everyone else. The people who progressed became better at carrying what worked from one failed attempt into the next.

Both groups kept trying.

The difference was whether the next attempt got smarter.

That is the part the hustle slogans tend to lose.

Failure does not automatically teach you anything. You have to extract something useful from it.

Which part worked? Where did interest disappear? What needs adjustment rather than demolition? Have you actually tried enough times to identify a pattern?

“I am getting nowhere” is a feeling.

“Four of my last 30 targeted messages produced conversations, and one became a project” is information.

Information gives you something to work with.

The goal is not to become unusually accomplished at failing.

It is to make sure the next attempt knows something the last one didn’t.

MOMENTUM OFTEN LOOKS UNIMPRESSIVE AT FIRST

I recently watched music entrepreneur Charlie Rocket discuss audience building through repeated appearances, direct engagement, comments, flyers and sustained activity inside one reachable community.

His broader idea was essentially:

Stop trying to heat the entire world. Bring one pot of water to a boil.

That travels well beyond music.

A single thoughtful comment, introduction, event or email may accomplish very little. But repeated useful contact with the right group of people can create familiarity, then trust, then opportunity.

Much of what later gets called momentum begins this way. It is not dramatic enough for entrepreneurial folklore.

It is 30 conversations, then another 30. A client mentioning your name to somebody else. Someone encountering your work for the fourth time. An article reaching the right person six months after you wrote it.

Businesses often wait for the viral post, dream introduction, enormous account or press feature that changes everything at once.

Sometimes that happens.

More often, the “sudden” breakthrough has been quietly assembling itself from hundreds of smaller actions.

THE GRIND IS NOT THE GOAL

This is where entrepreneurial culture can become dangerously stupid.

For a long time, I absorbed some version of the idea that relentless activity was itself evidence that I was succeeding.

I remember sitting in a peer group of entrepreneurs and describing everything I had been doing: starting early, working late, reaching out to people, sending emails and generally confusing motion with progress.

The group’s leader, serial entrepreneur Peter Holgate, cut me off.

“I’m not impressed by anything you’ve told us so far.”

I was surprised, but I quickly understood his point.

He did not care how exhausted I was.

He wanted to know what was working.

That distinction stuck with me.

There are periods when extraordinary effort is required. The Beatles playing marathon sets in Hamburg, Williamson recording hundreds of podcasts and Jet producing more than a thousand videos are not arguments against hard work.

They are arguments for productive work.

Busy is not a business model.

Neither is exhaustion.

If you have sent 500 emails and nobody is responding, congratulating yourself for sending another 500 may not be resilience.

You may simply be industrializing a bad email.

Sometimes the answer is greater volume. Sometimes it is a different audience, stronger offer, clearer message or a small private funeral for the tactic itself.

Look at the evidence.

If people respond but never buy, examine the offer, pricing, trust and sales process. If suitable people never respond, examine the targeting and message. If customers buy once but never return, examine the fit and delivery. If the economics fail even under generous assumptions, the numbers are telling you something.

My early Webcopy+ experiments were not sacred.

Neither are yours.

Persistence means staying committed to the goal, not blindly loyal to the tactic.

KEEP TAKING YOUR SHOTS

Effort guarantees nothing.

Talent, strategy, timing, relationships, resources and luck all affect outcomes. Some talented people work enormously hard and still lose.

But uncertainty cuts both ways.

You do not know which conversation will become the client, which introduction will change your direction, which proposal will finally connect or which song you consider average will travel around the world.

What you can influence is how many credible opportunities you create, what you learn when they fail and whether your attempts keep getting better.

Most successful people eventually get remembered for the thing that worked.

They lived through everything that didn’t.

So when the next shot misses, learn what you can from it and take another.

You never know which one will go in.

By Rick Sloboda, founder of Webcopy+ and website content strategist.

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