My family history is Swedish. Which means going to IKEA for me isn’t just a furniture run it’s something closer to Old Home Week. The meatballs. The lingonberries. The assembly instructions that somehow, eventually, make sense. There’s a comfort in it I can’t explain to anyone who didn’t grow up with that heritage.
So when I came across this quote from Ingvar Kamprad the man who built IKEA from a small Swedish mail-order business into one of the most recognized brands on the planet it stopped my scroll:
“Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active — of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right.”
He wrote that in The Testament of a Furniture Dealer and it didn’t land as a motivational poster quote. It landed as a challenge.
The Privilege Nobody Wants
We’ve built a culture in this industry where mistakes are career events. An agent misses a contingency deadline and it becomes a war story. A broker rolls out a new compensation model and it doesn’t stick, so they quietly shelve it and pretend it never happened. A recruiter pitches the wrong value proposition and retreats into what’s safe and familiar.
We treat mistakes like indictments. Kamprad treated them like proof of life.
The only people who don’t make mistakes are the ones who aren’t doing anything. The sleeping. The inactive. The people managing from a distance, afraid to make a call that might be wrong.
That’s not safety. That’s a slow fade.
What Active Actually Looks Like
The broker-owners winning right now — in this market, not the 2021 market — are not the ones who got everything right. They’re the ones who moved fast enough to collect real data, failed forward, and corrected.
They launched the recruiting campaign that bombed and learned which value proposition didn’t resonate — then built one that did. They hired the agent who looked great on paper but wasn’t a culture fit, then tightened their interview process. They restructured splits, lost two producers, and rebuilt a model that actually retained the right people.
None of that feels good in the moment. All of it compounds into a brokerage that actually functions.
The broker waiting for certainty before moving? Still waiting. The market didn’t pause. The competition didn’t either.
Correction Is the Skill
Kamprad wasn’t celebrating mistakes. He was celebrating the capacity to correct them and recognizing that correction only belongs to those active enough to make something go wrong in the first place.
We treat the mistake as the story. The correction is actually the story.
Your best recruiters aren’t the ones who never said the wrong thing. They’re the ones who said the wrong thing, noticed it wasn’t working, adjusted in real time, and closed anyway. Your best agents aren’t the ones who never mispriced a listing. They’re the ones who had the hard conversation with the seller, reduced the price, and protected the relationship anyway.
The skill isn’t perfection. The skill is what you do the minute after something goes sideways.
For the affiliates and service providers reading this: mistakes in relationship-based businesses aren’t fatal. Radio silence after the mistake is. The ones who correct fast, communicate clearly, and show back up keep the business. The ones who disappear lose it.
You can’t steer a parked car. You can’t correct a mistake you never made because you never tried anything.
What’s the thing you’ve been holding back on because you were afraid of getting it wrong?
Get it wrong. Then fix it.
Win The Day!
