THE ROAD TO RICHES: A 10-step entrepreneur blueprint to wealth by the Entrepreneur Abdallah Abu Sheikh.
Lesson Two:
LEARN FROM THE MASTER
Warren Buffet says “ It is good to learn from your mistakes, but it is always better to learn from other’s mistakes”. As an entrepreneur you will come to find out that time is the most valuable thing you have. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is waste your time trying to solve hurdles that were already solved by someone else and that is where mentors come in.
Now you are at a step in your journey where you have found your problem and you are looking to develop a practical creative solution to it in the easiest way possible.
In order for you to do that, you need to be educated. For a lot of people this could be challenging as in today’s world we are rarely educated in the practicalities and the technicalities of the business world.
The kind of education we receive is usually general knowledge, and that is of no help to you in your journey to wealth.
In almost every industry the people who attain success are people who have specific knowledge of their service or product. Not people with general financial or economic knowledge, as they saying goes “if theories made money, economics teachers would be the richest people in the world”. And that relates to the fact, that entrepreneurship is a practical learning experience and not a theoretical one.
That is why choosing a mentor to learn from is one of the most vital and decisive parts of being an entrepreneur. A good mentor will make you avoid certain mistakes that they have faced before. They could open your eyes to problem and solutions you did not know about.
Having a mentor will also expand your network in ways you cannot do on your own. Building on a mentors experience could fast-track your road to success in more ways than one. As per the Chinese metaphor “only a fool would waste time learning how to make bread when he can use his grandma’s recipe.”
A mentor is a bridge that you can use to get to your destination without having to go through the hassle of building one on your own.
Do not take opinions!
In today’s world due to the expansive amount of free knowledge available like the internet and such, many people fall under the impression that they are knowledgeable about a certain topic or a certain industry. Many people believe some people are subject matter experts while in fact, they are not.
Most of the time everyone you come across will have an opinion about your business and will try to convince you that it is the right one. Therefore, be careful of opinions for if people knew how to do it, they would do it themselves.
Henry Ford said, “If I asked people what they wanted they would’ve asked for faster horses.”
It is always good to gather feedback but it does not have to decide the future of your business and remember a true mentor is someone with real hands-on practical experience of the industry that you are in and not someone who has an opinion about it or someone who merely studied or read about it.
Today, people choose mentors on the basis of how many followers they have on social media, or on the basis of how many views they get and this is a wrong standard.
Everyone can talk the talk, but only a few do the actual work and walk the walk to get the job done. Seek the advice of those people.
The Entrepreneur – Lesson Two
This is the second lesson piece out of 10. The remaining will be produced in a sequential articles and lessons under the title of THE ROAD TO RICHES as part of Venture’s new column: The Entrepreneur by Abdallah Abu Sheikh, covering entrepreneurship topic and function as a guide for start-ups.
For lesson Three
Managing Director
LUX Enterprises
