Day 26: You Don't Know Everything

Acknowledging that you don’t know everything is powerful… and difficult. If you’ve been following our advice, then you’ve hired smart, capable people who do their jobs better than you’d be able to do (or you plan to do this as soon as you start hiring). You hired these people for good reason, not to help you feel like you’re the omniscient ruler of the business world. Let them contribute to the greater cause. Embrace the idea that you will learn from them, and do not try to keep them down.

You might make mistakes.

Reconsider why you feel like you need to know everything. Is it fear? Ego? Try to tap into your psyche (Ah! Scary!) to determine why you’re afraid that you’re not the smartest person in the room. How boring life would be if there was nothing left to learn?

The cold, hard truth is that many of the expertise great entrepreneurs have, they have because they’ve “been there, done that.” No amount of reading and studying mergers can teach you everything you need to know to orchestrate a successful one. All the psychology textbooks in the world cannot fully prepare you for inter-personal office crises among your employees. The point is, get out there and DO. Do not put off launching your business because of all the skills you do not have yet. Do not let the fear of the unknown stand in the way of getting your business off the ground. You will unavoidably have failures along the way, but how will you ever know how good you can be unless you give it your best shot?

What do you do now:

1. Get out a piece of paper and a pen.
2. Make three columns.
3. Label the columns “Things I Rock at,” “Things I Want to Do Better,” and “Things I Don’t Care if I Can Do.”
4. Fill column one in with your marketable skills, the things that make people want to hire you, the skills that set you apart.
5. In column two, jot down the skills you’d love to improve upon, the things that you admire in other people that maybe you just haven’t had the time/energy/ability to master.
6. In column three, write down the skills you think are important to your business that you find totally boring and don’t care to learn much about.
7. Hang this piece of paper somewhere that you can see it clearly. Focus on keeping the skills you listed in column 1 sharp. Make a plan to improve upon at LEAST one of the skills you wrote in column 2 this month. Then, when you have the resources, hire people to do the things in column 3.

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