A beauty of travelling for living is that life does provide the most entertaining material for blog posts.
We were chatting to the team at ApexHub about this blog and decided that we might experiment with using Friday as a chance for me to reflect upon the week just gone – and decide which particular quotation, used or heard during the week, would be the most use to you.
I’m always good for a challenge – so here goes…..
Quote of the week
Do you want to learn from my mistakes or your own?
When you are hiring a trainer, consultant, coach or mentor – what are you buying?
The intellectual property they carry or……
The wisdom of their experience?
There are no end of good people out there who can train, consult and even coach.
Most of the what they deliver can be found on the internet or in a good bookshop.
I’ve often said that everything you need to know about how to run a dental practice is either in Waterstones or on Amazon.
But mentoring is a key – because you are buying the years of experience that the mentor has “enjoyed”, building his/her own business and working with clients.
This isn’t ageist – at The Strategic Coach they talk about “the school of transactions” and suggest that you know how to do something well after you have done it 200 times.
(think – 200 implants placed, 200 appraisals conducted, 200 profit & loss statements analysed)
In his book “Outliers”, Malcolm Gladwell provides compelling evidence that it takes 10,000 hours to become a “genius”.
You can be a genius at the age of 9 (Mozart) because you have the hours under your belt.
When you run your own business you are going to make a lot of mistakes.
The smart money is on hiring a mentor who has made them before you – because they will identify the warning signals before you get there – and save you a lot of time, money and anguish.
So next time you hire external help – ask a simple question:
“what are the biggest mistakes you have made and what have you learned from them?”
Its the person with the most scars who will be the most helpful.
Speaking of which………
