You Often Win by Simply Making Fewer Mistakes

You Often Win by Simply Making Fewer Mistakes

I had a thought today.

Football and business are surprisingly similar in one important way:

You don’t have to constantly do something brilliant to win.

Sometimes, you win simply because you make fewer mistakes than everyone else.

Think about a really good football team.

Yes, there are moments of brilliance.

The perfect pass.

The incredible goal.

The player who beats three defenders and creates something out of nothing.

But most of the 90 minutes?

It’s much more boring.

Hold your position.

Play the simple pass.

Don’t lose the ball in stupid situations.

Track your opponent.

Stay focused.

Do the basics right.

Again and again and again.

And I think business works exactly the same way.

The problem is:

I’ve definitely scored some own goals.

One example?

I invested around $20,000 into a vibe-coded app instead of realizing early enough that the underlying tech wasn’t the right foundation and switching sooner.

That was an expensive lesson.

Another one?

I’ve built things and waited way too long to actually market them.

Weeks and months spent improving something that I could have put in front of real customers much earlier.

Looking back, some of my biggest business mistakes weren’t because I wasn’t capable of doing something.

They came from decisions that, in hindsight, were avoidable.

And that’s the interesting part.

You don’t need to predict the future perfectly.

You don’t need to have the best idea in the world.

You don’t need to make genius decisions every day.

Warren Buffett has talked about this principle for decades:

A huge part of long-term success is simply avoiding stupid mistakes.

And the longer I’m in business, the more I understand what he means.

We tend to obsess over the spectacular stuff.

The genius idea.

The huge launch.

The million-dollar deal.

The company that suddenly explodes.

But maybe the bigger advantage is much less exciting:

Stay in the game.

Make good decisions consistently.

Recognize bad decisions faster.

Correct them before they become expensive.

And stop scoring unnecessary own goals.

Because if you can do that for 5, 10 or 20 years…

you’re probably going to beat a lot of people who might occasionally be more brilliant than you.

Not because you never made mistakes.

But because you learned to make fewer of them.

And hopefully, to recognize them earlier.

If you want another entrepreneur looking at your business with you — and potentially help you avoid some of the mistakes I had to learn the expensive way — you can book 5 Business Consultations with me here.

Sometimes one avoided mistake pays for a lot more than one great idea.

Christian