Do you own a business and are struggling to expand it?
Are you planning a startup and lacking in confidence?
And you want to solve the problem?
If your answer is yes, then this post is for you.
You are doing everything right, but still unable to march ahead in business. This is the case with many aspiring business people. You wonder why?
The answer lies in fundamental life lessons. These powerful life lessons increase your ability to be successful in business. Unfortunately, schools don’t teach important life lessons that help to improve your business and quality of life.
Let’s discuss the 7 important life lessons schools don’t teach us and how to solve those problems.
1. Make Mistakes
Right from the beginning of your schooling, you were never allowed to make mistakes. So, what happened is, you never had a chance to correct the mistake and learn from it. This idea that you should never make mistakes is, in reality, making you weaker.
Because of this, even a small hurdle in business or any other venture breaks us down.
Why? Because we are all designed to learn from mistakes. Mistakes make you more creative. Only when you make a mistake and fail in your attempt, you will find solutions. The sooner you make mistakes in your life and learn from them, the stronger a person you would become.
Stop worrying about your mistakes. Always remember that ‘to err is human.’ Mistakes are part of growth. Soon, you’ll realise you have come a long way.
2. Handle pressure
Ok, now you are ready to make mistakes and learn from them. When you make mistakes, you would feel the pressure build.
Say, you made a small mistake in sales pitching and that cost you a great business opportunity. You feel terrible, right?
Don’t panic. That’s natural. Because you didn’t learn how to handle pressure in your schooling.
Schools taught you how to succeed. In turn, you learned how to handle success. But, your school didn’t teach you how to handle failures and most importantly, the pressure of failures.
This results in a huge emotional explosion when you get exposure to failures. Your ability is tested because of this.
How you respond to pressure and stress determines your success in life.
How do you learn to handle it?
Get exposed to failures. Anticipate the pressure from your failures. Instead of thinking about the problems, start looking for solutions.
For instance, if you realise your business’ online presence is not sufficient enough to beat the competition, find an expert in digital marketing and handover the task.
3. Financial education
When we talk about pressure in business, ‘finance pressure’ would top the list. Every business owner, at a point of time, would have felt the cash crunch.
Has it happened to you? Do you wonder what the reason is? Because you didn’t study (or should I say you were not taught?) an extremely important concept: “How money works?”
Here is a typical scenario:
Your school education, college education, and everything else in your childhood and teenage needed financial planning. You had no idea how to plan and save money till then.
You enter into higher education, and that requires a loan. Then you are forced to calculate how to work part-time and repay the loan on time. Then, you want to buy a car, and again you have to take a loan. Again plan how to earn a lot to repay it. And the list goes on and on.
You are stuck because you didn’t study finance in schools.
Undeniably, finance is one of the major causes of stress in adults. I’m not talking about being poor here. Even the wealthiest adults have stress over their finance management at times.
Why is it happening? Lack of financial education. Lack of awareness of savings and debt management. Schools teach nothing about finances at the root level. Sadly, the problem doesn’t end with finance management itself. Eventually, it can ruin relationships; it may lead to divorce, tremendous stress, severe health conditions, and bankruptcy.
This is why you should start learning finance much earlier by reading books like rich dad, poor dad, The Millionaire Next Door, Think and Grow Rich etc.
4. Be an employer, Not an employee
Let me get it straight. I’m not saying working in a good company is bad at all. It would be a great learning to work with them.
The problem I highlight here is the mindset we are developed into. Schools are designed to create students with an ‘employee’ mindset. Even a single mistake in your work would get you the pressure of work. As we discussed in previous points, this pressure will definitely halt your career progress.
You have always been prepared to face exams and interviews. Schools fail to create entrepreneurs. The school set up constantly controls your mindset to become an employee. You are being educated to be an accountant, engineer, manager, clerk, etc.; but never taught to become an entrepreneur.
This fundamental flaw stops you from even thinking of becoming an employer.
Start thinking yourself as an entrepreneur. Read about how successful entrepreneurs think. This will naturally change your mindset.
5. Follow Your Passion
Let me ask you a simple question.
Did your school ever ask about your passion of interest? You know the answer.
You might have been a good singer, guitarist, football player, or a great orator, but your school didn’t bother about that. You studied what you think would get you a job.
There is a saying that everyone uses at least once. “Life is too short.”
Indeed, it is. The process of accumulating wealth eats more than half of our life. Your entire youth is wasted in education and career that didn’t bother about your passion.
This generic approach has killed the inner passion of so many youngsters.
Your productivity is hit badly when you do things that you don’t love to do.
Start thinking out of the box. Spend quality time developing your skill that is going to rock the world. When you really love your work, you won’t feel like you are working. You will feel complete.
6. Believe in yourself
Who do you think is most concerned about you?
It’s ‘YOU’.
And who should you believe the most? Again, it’s you.
Throughout your schooling, you were being evaluated by your scores. When you scored less, you are made to believe you were not smart enough to compete. When you failed an academic test, you were made to believe you were out of the game.
Trust me; it is NOT true. Stop believing in grading systems. Start believing yourself. Only when you believe in yourself, you will have your true power unleashed. Regardless of what others say, you will succeed – if you believe in yourself.
The world didn’t believe humans could fly until the Wright brothers believed in themselves.
7. Time is more valuable than money
Money is the magic word in human evolution. We all chase money. We get money; we lose money.
Have you ever wondered what the price we pay in search of money is?
TIME.
Steve Jobs once said ‘”Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
Our schools never teach us how important time is. We are all taught to accumulate wealth. We are taught how to earn money.
It is the biggest irony that we tend to forget this simple thing in life: Time is a one-way journey. No turning back. You can earn more money, but you can never earn more time. We can create more memories with time than money. What you become is determined by how you spend your time.
We all know this. But we all forget this in the hunt for money. Because our schools give more importance to teaching us about the grade than time.
Use your time effectively. Always keep in mind that time is precious than everything else in life.
Conclusion
Schools are not designed to develop your skills. They don’t worry about your passion. They want to create employees, not employers.
You are not here to get jobs, pay some bills and then die.
God made you for a purpose.
Trust yourself. Respect your passion.
Start living for yourself.
Once you start believing in your dream and have the desire to work for it, your business, career, passion, or anything else for that matter would shine naturally!
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