Why Wordle is a Microcosm for Entrepreneurship.

Last week my Wordle consecutive win streak ended at 57. Sure, it’s nowhere near the 300+ streaks others on Reddit claim to have going strong, but over the course of that win streak, I began to recognize a pattern in my strategy:

To win, it’s essential to make as many mistakes as possible.

It’s advice that’s easy to give, but not always easy to adhere to. In fact, in my streak-breaking game, I lost purely because I chose to avoid a mistake. Let me explain:?

In this particular game I had three correct letters with two guesses left. My board looked like this: __O__ER. The problem was obvious: Too many potential words could be spelled with too few guesses left. On guess 5 (my second last guess) I should have tried to spell a completely incorrect word with the remaining unused letters. Yes, I should have made a mistake. This would have benefited me in two ways: it would allow me to rule out as many letters as possible, and it would offer up more opportunities to identify at least one of the remaining letters – even if it wasn’t in the correct position.

But I didn’t. Instead, I tried to solve it – meaning on guess 5, I burned 3 out of 5 opportunities to learn – simply by using letters I already knew were correct. I can’t remember what I guessed at that point, but I do remember feeling that this incorrect guess put me into a do or die position on guess 6. With my streak on the line, and sensing that it was a complex “trap” word, I went with a bold choice: BOXER. And yeah, I got knocked out. The correct answer was JOKER. There it was – JOKER – laughing at me not because I got guess 6 incorrect. But because I missed an opportunity on guess 5 to make a calculated mistake – one that I could have learned from – and potentially kept my streak alive.

So, what does all of this have to do with being an entrepreneur? It’s actually quite straightforward:

If we’re always trying to get things right, we’re always going to lose. It’s true. If you stop and think about it, Wordle is actually a microcosm for entrepreneurship.

You start the game with a blank slate. In the case of Wordle, it’s a grid: 6 high and 5 wide. Basically, your first row has 5 blank spaces staring at you, asking, “okay, whatadda ya got?”

We all know the goal: Solve the puzzle. But you’re starting with no clues. You take a shot in the dark with your first guess. But here’s the crazy part:

In Wordle, nobody is disappointed when they get their first guess wrong.

Seriously, have you ever solved Wordle on your first try? I haven’t.

Like building a business, Wordle’s not meant to be a game where you get one shot. Your first guess is all about giving you clues. What did you get right? What letters have you eliminated? This is invaluable information for you to make your second guess – one that’s still very likely to be incorrect.

But with each failure, you learn what’s working, and what’s not. If you’ve ever started a business, this should sound very familiar.

The problem is, many first-time entrepreneurs don’t see the value in making mistakes. They believe that their first move needs to be the right one.

I get it. The stakes in business are high – a lot higher than in a silly online word game. But if we take this innocent little game and apply it to our beliefs around business, we’ll see how unreasonable our entrepreneurial beliefs really are.

Let’s start with the “cold feet crowd.” I don’t know what the stats are, but I’d wager that most people dreaming of starting a business never do – purely out of fear that they won’t get it right. So yes, it would be like looking at a clean Wordle grid and stressing over the fact that you might not get that first guess right. So, they close their tab and keep working at the job they’ve hated for decades, essentially choosing the mistake they know all too well, over the potential mistake they don’t. Crazy, right?

Others show bravery and start their business, which in Wordle is the equivalent of selecting 5 letters to form a random word – a move that’s almost never the right answer.

At this point, some new entrepreneurs see incorrect guess number 1 as abject failure and they give up. “Didn’t work. I’m not cut out for this.”

Others double down. They believe their first guess was a good word and the game just doesn’t get it. So they enter the same guess again, spending a valuable second guess on the exact same thing that was already proven to be incorrect. This could go on and on, and for some business owners, they continue bashing their heads against the wall, entering the same five-letter word over and over until they run out of guesses, lose the game, and wonder why they have a headache.

In business, let’s say the parallel is that the six guesses you’re given in Wordle represents your financial runway. For the bull-headed entrepreneur doubling and tripling down on their word that they KNOW has to be the right answer, they overshoot their runway, and their business fails. For the ones who gave up after one guess, they also fail. But there are those who understand the benefits of learning from mistakes. These are the ones who thrive in the world of guesses four through six.

Getting it right on the first try is a fluke. But getting it wrong on the first, second, third, fourth, or even fifth try is nothing short of a gift. When you stop and think about it, in business, a first-guess success is nothing short of a disaster, because you’re left with no clues for future growth.

For me, as a co-founder of an agency that’s less than two years old, I’ve already made boatloads of mistakes. And I’ll continue to make more mistakes as time goes on. But with each mistake, I’m flattening the learning curve on so many aspects of business that I didn’t even know existed.

I didn’t think that way at first. I had a hard time embracing mistakes. Like the Wordle player who believed in the importance of getting it right on the first try, I was hesitant to “burn a guess” on something if I didn’t know it was going to be absolutely 100% right. I’m slowly getting over that, and with each micro-pivot we make in our business, we’re learning invaluable lessons along the way about what to keep, what to shift around, and what to lose completely.

Sometimes, we all need to be reminded that our initial efforts are just guesses. We need to stop expecting to get things perfect right out of the gate. Just be comfortable figuring things out as you go.

If you’re holding back on a dream of doing your own thing, like I was for many years, just know that your first unavoidable mistake will be the greatest gift of all.

Even if your business idea is the equivalent of guessing “ZYGOTE” in Wordle – a choice that’s statistically improbable as hell to be correct, it’ll still get you a lot closer to your dream than you’d be if you’d given in to your cold feet, closed your tab, and never guessed at all.?

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Jed Churcher is a creative director, speaker, and Co-Founder of Library Collective, an LA-based real people creative agency that believes the right answers almost never come from agencies alone, which is why they work with curated groups of consumers to co-create solutions for large clients such as Intuit TurboTax, Fila, and Albertsons. At the time of this writing, his Wordle streak is already back up to 6.