[:en]
by Stevenson Q. Yu
Proverbs 5:13-14
I did not listen to the voice of my teachers or incline my ear to my instructors. I am at the brink of utter ruin in the assembled congregation.
These two verses form part of an entire section in Proverbs where Solomon warned all young men against adultery. The adulteress will lead you astray, Solomon said, and cause you to lose your honor and even your life. Because you did not listen to your teachers, your life is ruined.
This is the same with business. As you build up your business and achieve a measure of success, there is always the danger that you stop listening to the counsel of your teachers and mentors. Either you start listening to yourself (thus becoming stagnant), or listen only to yes-men (who only tell you what you want to hear) or worse, conmen who would milk you for every centavo you have.
You should never stop learning, period. Admit that you don’t know everything, and be willing to learn from all sources: customers, suppliers, peers, and even your employees. By learning new things, you learn to appreciate the world from a different perspective.
For example, learning more about how your industry works can help you see a new way of doing things. Or a new market opportunity you have not considered before. Or a new technology that make you unique from your competitors and provide you with an advantage in business.
Learning a new language lets you communicate with business partners from other countries, without the need of a translator. This helps you build trust.
Thanks to the Internet, you don’t need connections to mentors and educators to be teachable. There are many online learning websites1 that cover a wide variety of subjects. Not just business school topics, but even things like music, personal development, and foreign languages.
Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and regarded as one of the best investors in the world, reads a lot. He spends 80% of his workday reading and thinking, going through 500 pages a day. He considers it as an investment, saying that all that knowledge builds up “like compound interest.”2 In fact, Buffett’s willingness to read hundreds of pages of financial statements every day gave him an advantage when it comes to choosing the right companies to invest in.
Bill Gates, another famous billionaire, is also a very wide reader. He has a blog where he shares his reading list and reviews the latest books that he reads.
In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, set a personal challenge to learn Mandarin. His wife Priscilla was Chinese, and he wanted to be able to talk to his wife’s father and grandmother who spoke only Chinese. Four years later, the world was amazed when Zuckerberg talked only in Mandarin with Tsinghua University students during a 30-minute Q&A session.3
We live today in a world that moves at the speed of thought, with the situation changing every second. You have to be teachable and willing to learn, or risk being overtaken by someone who is.
Endnotes
- Top sites include Coursera, Lynda.com, Udemy, Khan Academy, and eDX. Some sites allow you to audit the courses for free, and you pay only if you want to receive a certificate of completion.
- Kim, L. (2015, May 19). You Did This as a Kid, but the Greatest Entrepreneurs Never Stopped. Retrieved June 1, 2018, from https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/you-did-this-as-a-kid-but-the-greatest-entrepreneursnever-stopped.html
- See https://youtu.be/8Xpdhbh_2Rc for the video, with accompanying subtitles. To be fair, Mark Zuckerberg’s Mandarin was very clumsy. But this gesture was appreciated by the Chinese students, and this illustrates the willingness of Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire at the age of 23, to learn new things.
(LinkS to Lesson 2 and lesson 4)
[:]