Count Attempts, Not Failures

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onepercent The people you admire have failed more times than most people have even tried. Michael Jordan...

Most people quit because the scoreboard looks ugly at the start. This post flips that thinking: instead of tracking how many times you’ve “failed,” you track how many shots you’ve taken. The Instagram graphics make it painfully clear that legends aren’t batting 1.000 — they’re just willing to swing more than everyone else. When you see the numbers, it gets hard to justify quitting after a tiny sample size.

How to use this in your own work

Instead of asking, “Why am I not winning?” ask, “How many attempts have I actually logged?” Ten sales calls, ten videos, or ten emails is not a data set, it’s a warm-up. Set a target number of attempts (50, 100, 1,000) and make that your real goal. Track attempts like a scientist, not emotions like a drama queen. When you zoom out, your job stops being “avoid failure” and becomes “earn more at-bats.”

The math behind greatness

The graphic shows a basketball icon’s 24,537 attempts with about a 49.7% success rate — meaning half of their career was technically a miss.
A famous painter in the graphic created around 150,000 pieces, with roughly 41,500 auction sales, or about a 27% “hit rate.”
The chart highlights a tennis champion with 81 tournaments and 23 major titles, which is only a 28% success rate on the biggest stage.
Another slide shows legendary musicians whose hits are a small slice of their 1,300+ and 3,000-song catalogs.
The final image spells it out in plain text: the whole game is to keep going, not to be perfect.