Sometimes It Has To Be The Hard Way

You seek out some of the most expert people around you to get advice from. You pay for books, online courses and attend workshops and conferences, all to reduce the likelihood of failure and/or to speed up your journey. Theoretically, therefore, you should be coasting through business growth by simply implementing all the strategies and tactics the experts have told you to do.

So why doesn’t your business grow failure free? Are you working with the wrong experts? Are you consciously deciding not taking their advice? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Whilst you can eliminate a lot of the pain by learning from others, the unexpected will and does happen.

The other thing about books, courses, conferences, and seminars, however, open you are taking advice, sometimes you are being taught things when you are simply not ready to listen. You are not being deliberately closed or obstructive, but sometimes you have to be right in the middle of being stuck before you are enlightened that it is time to implement a particular solution.

I was attending a webinar recently and the hosts were going through a teaching point I have heard them talk about time and time again. Previously their point was so utterly irrelevant to what I was focussed on at that time, I simply heard the words. I had no frame of reference or personal context to apply it, so it was just noise. Until I was myself immersed in the context they spoke about some months later and even quite uncomfortably so, I didn’t understand the point of the teaching.

Why were you encouraged to do work experience as a teenager or as part of your degree course? However much you are taught in a classroom environment it only has meaning once you are immersed in context and real life. Even when you try your best, mistakes are inevitable, you learn the hard way but effectively.

“The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.” Tom Bodett

Driving is the same, you only truly learn to drive after you pass your practical driving test, when your instructor is no longer sat by your side.

In innovative businesses, you must also work through suggested solutions versus other solutions you are developing at the time, you need to apply the rule of trial and error. Very often, therefore, albeit informed by others, you will still be doing things that feel the hard way, but be reassured they are the right way.

“If you have only gone through the teaching process, even if you have been taught well, it doesn’t become perfected until you go through the trial and error of using the principles you were taught. The action you take to prove the value of a principle is called experience.” Joan Jessalyn Cox

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