Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
August 2018
- When This Executive Was Fired, He Took Charge
- Obeying The Speed Limit Has Never Been More Fun
- London Black Cabs Helped Uber Grow
- Bette Graham Created A Product To Fix Her Mistakes
- Flamin' Hot Cheetos Had An Interesting Start
July 2018
- Fear This Instead Of Failure
- Re-Releasing Songs Created Success
- A CEO's Purposeful Mistake
- The Tardy Student And The Unsolvable Problem
- Fixing Potholes Through Graffiti
June 2018
- A Surprising Mistake In The Oxford English Dictionary
- US Army Embraces Mistakes
- Blocking A Hymn
- Eddie Shore Was Truly A Tough Guy
- [Video] Elon Musk Didn't "Pivot" He Failed
May 2018
- 8 Examples of Mental Toughness Part 2
- Necessity Turned Accessory: Allen Iverson's Sleeve
- This Doctor Has Continued To Fail
- 8 Examples of Mental Toughness
- MIT Accidentally Creates New Smelting Process
April 2018
- Johnny Cash Quit Singing Lessons
- Cruise Control Came Out of Frustration
- Time Spent Gaming Pays Off In The Navy
- Rock Around The Clock Was a Commercial Failure
- Sigmund Freud Should Have Been Discouraged
March 2018
Email Failures and Successes
So, we sent out a bunch of emails to the many, many people Robby has met over the years to announce the book. We learned a lot about email failure.
First, let’s discuss the failures anyone could have predicted:
- Old addresses wither and die. If you haven’t sent a note to email address in many years, the chances are pretty good that the address has gone bad. We got over 500 “undeliverable”
- Free Email Beats Paid Email – People whose email addresses were connected to their Internet Service Provider tended to be less accurate than those who signed up for free accounts with Hotmail, GMail and Yahoo! That’s because ISPs get bought and sold and the email addresses no longer work.
- Autoreplies are annoying. It’s one thing to get an “I’m on vacation message” from one person, but something else to get hundreds of them all at once!
Photo © Flickr User ginnerobot
It’s also tough to characterize an email like this. Is it marketing to send a message to your friends? Certain kinds of email messages are classified under the CAN-SPAM act. A few people responded that they wanted to be “taken off our list.”
However, is an address book really a list? We haven’t been assembling all of these names for email marketing purposes. Rather, these are just contacts from people Robby has met over the years that are in his electronic rolodex.
In this age of information overload, unwanted messages are failures. Yet sometimes we have to try to send someone a message to find out if they want to hear from us again!
The best part of our “email campaign?” Hundreds of people replied. Robby’s still going through those messages to say hello to old friends and colleagues. So, our failure led to success.
