Every entrepreneur you ask will probably give you a different take on the secret to making it In business. Their answers may prove inconsistent or even contradictory, but few of them would touch upon what’s proven to be the most important habit for success in running a venture: a constant urge to learn.
An open and inquisitive mind is far from the only thing you’ll need to thrive, but it is a requisite. It’s the key to curating a healthy professional network, maximizing the gains of your experience, and devising solutions to the limitless problems that are bound to occur.
Curating Your Network
The compulsion to interact with your peers within an industry, attend conferences, and rent office space at a coworking space like The Common Desk is healthy, but ultimately taxing. Unless you’re a social prodigy, maintaining close ties with a range of professional contacts can be difficult to sustain in the long run, especially after they’ve exhausted what you perceive to be their value.
A drive to learn can keep socializing fresh and attractive prospect over the long run, rather than something to treat as a chore (which, by the way, people can see right through). Treating each contact like a potential mentor and knowing you’ll never run out of lessons to learn provided you ask the right questions gives you the perspective to extract value from each interaction, and seek more –key parts of what it takes to maintain a valuable circle of contacts.
Maximizing the Gains of Your Experience
Gleaning the value from surrounding yourself with other professionals at an office for rent like https://thecommondesk.com/ is one thing, but a focus on learning also enables you to fully appreciate the value of your working experience.
Learning from experience takes a level of metacognition (that is to say, mindfulness of your own learning process) best achieved by placing your ongoing education near the top of your set of priorities. You don’t need to dive into the theory behind it, just know that we tend to learn better when we pay attention to how we learn, and that that happens as a consequence of attributing value to the activity.
Make learning your goal, and each success, failure, and challenge becomes a learning point that you’ll find becomes easier to process and adapt into better business decisions in the future.
Devising Solutions to Your Endless Problems
The difference between an employee and an entrepreneur is that the former has the luxury of having their own problems to deal with. The latter, for better or worse, has to contend with the problems of the organization as a whole, as well as the problems of each constituent employee.
It’s enough to give even veteran business owners migraines for days, but can be made much easier to handle with a constructive outlook. A focus on learning does two things in this respect: it forces the entrepreneur to view problems as valuable foci for reflection and further knowledge, and prepares them to deal with more problems down the line.
Your attitude towards troubleshooting influences the sophistication of your approach, as well as the stress you have to endure to get through it. Moreover, it ensures that no lesson passes without being taken to heart and adapted into your toolset for the next big dilemma.
Learning is central to success in many aspects of life, and business is no exception. Fixate on every chance to smarten up, and watch as your social endurance, gains from experience, and problem solving acumen increase.