He who learns
By: marcashton
My personal saying in life is “He who dares…”
The person that is afraid to try something will often be the person who will live with the most regrets. I had an interesting meeting today with one of the senior lecturers of a major business college in Johannesburg and when I walked out the door I had modified this saying to “He who learns…”
I actually came away so motivated that I wanted to nit pick away at my business and actually put what I had learnt into action.
I have harped on it before but too often Entrepreneurs believe they know it all and can’t learn from a support team or other members of the business community. Too often they romanticise the notion that you can’t learn “street smarts” from a business course and that the only way you become successful is by actually doing it yourself. I know that I believed this for a long time…
But my thinking has changed – you can learn plenty from anybody who has tried, failed or even succeeded. It’s the way that you approach them and see if you can learn from what they did right or what they did wrong.
Why pay your own “school fees” when you can tap into people who have tried something, not got it quite right and then fine tuned their offering? Seems like a no brainer to me.
My lesson for entrepreneurs today is simple – you can learn from anyone – you simply need to open your ears and eyes to what they were saying.
About the author: Marc Ashton is Managing Editor of ManufacturingHub.co.za (www.manufacturinghub.co.za) an industrial publication aimed at the South African Food, Pharmaceutical, Chemical and Cosmetic Manufacturing industries. In his spare time he operates the Bad Entrepreneur blog (badentrepreneur.bundublog.com/)