Get a Mentor: Experience is a slow teacher!
photo credit: Hankins
You’ve heard people say it, “experience is the best teacher, book learning is all crock”
or something similar. I have to disagree! No amount of book learning can replace skill or practice. However it’s pretty hard to make a mistake after you read about it in a book. But of course it takes experience to correct that mistake or to improve a skill. You can read everything about flying an airplane, but if you’ve never flew a plane you don’t have the skill and precision of an experienced pilot who knows how to land a place safely, despite what the textbook says. So what do you do? You learn from an experienced pilot who knows how to fly a plane and can give you step by step instructions on how to apply your knowledge.
The BIG problem with experience or trial and error is that it takes a lot of time, money and disappointments. I basically learned web development in a few years by trial and error. But trial and error only got me so far. It wasn’t until I met some experienced web designers that I learned the REAL way to code. I can look back and think of how unskilled I’d be now days if I would have continued with my trial and error method, it would have taken me another 10 years just to get to where I am now.
Skills:
You need to try a lot of techniques, get lots of feedback and spend lots of time hoping a praying that someday all this shit will pay off. Bits and peaces of information will fly by you, you’ll absorb some, forget lots and then find out that some of what you forgot was actually necessary. After years and years(or months and months, depending on the depth of the skill you need) you might still be struggling, trying to find the right syntax to make it work. You might eventually get frustrated and give up.
Have you ever stopped to think why successful people are successful? And why you do the same things that they do but still haven’t quite got there? You’d commonly think to yourself, “well they have better ideas than I do” The Third Man movies or “they’ve had so much more experience”.
Here’s a scary thought: You might be very old before you have accomplished something in the business world. And even then you might be only limited to small successes, slightly above average earnings and you still might not have the work/life balance you always hoped for.
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discourage you from pursuing a business. As an entrepreneur I feel your pain! Not in terms of money, but in the amount of time and sleep I’ve given up to pour efforts into things that I thought would make a difference but never seemed to. I’d lie to myself and say that it would all even out some how in the end, but the end never comes because of specific steps have been missed, causing me to go back to the beginning. And then one day it hit me…
Find a mentor who can look at your situation and tell you what you’re not seeing:
A mentor can be a worst enemy or a best friend, depending on your mentality. Often they will push you to do things that you think you can’t do yourself, but they understand that to change your results you need to change what you’re doing. Even if it hurts a bit. A mentor will not only tell you what you have to do but also tell you in what order you have to do them.
Success has a syntax.
It’s not enough to just do the right things, but it’s important to know in what order you do them. If you take the words “David killed the Giant” and rearrange the syntax “the Giant killed David”, you get a different meaning right? What if you rearrange the words to “Killed the Giant David”, same words but it now makes no sense…
See you could be doing all the right things and still get a totally different results. A mentor can tell you WHAT you need to do and in which ORDER to do them.
I believe in doing things in the most effective way possible. You could spend years and years trying the combination until you finally open the safe. Successful people know not only what do to but also in what combination to do them. For example, if a combination for a safe is 6787, using the same numbers but in a different order 8677 will not get you in the safe. Makes sense?
Why reinvent the wheel when there’s so many examples of success around us every day? They say success leaves clues. Why not become successful right now if right now is the time?
