Business Lessons Help You Grow as a Leader
I was just in Colorado with a bunch of CEOs for a very powerful learning event, and, as usual, over lunch or dinner, we shared stories about how we’d built our businesses.
I got into a very deep conversation with one wildly successful CEO about the learning and punishment that comes from building a company without knowing what you were doing. He started his business with essentially no education because he’d dropped out of school. He just had a goal to be very successful and hustled like mad to get his business off the ground. Those were crazy, early days of pure desire and very little skill. If you were meet this person today, you’d think he’d grown up in a successful family, gone to the best schools and been around great achievement his entire life.
He said, "I didn’t know what great people were like, and hired many
people without knowing what I was doing. Some worked out and some didn’t. I learned and tried again and again and again."
Thousands of mistakes and millions of dollars later, he - like many others - has grown into a very smart and successful leader. He’s wildly successful - in a different country than he grew up in - and, in his own mind, is just getting started, with a lot more to accomplish and a lot more to learn.
This ties in with Michelle LaVallee’s blog this week on leadership maturity.
There’s nothing like the tough lessons of business to straighten you out and to help you grow smarter. Like the hard knocks of a kid learning to ride a bike, you need an environment that gives you an amazing opportunity to grow stronger and smarter, and tough feedback. For entrepreneurs, that tough feedback comes from customers, profitability of the business and pain. You just need
to be open to it, and embrace it.
|
