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Get Smart … Without Letting Your Guard Down

By Mark Riffey

One of the things I’m always pushing clients to do is expand their education.

This education expands well beyond your line of business, because there are valuable lessons from every industry.

Likewise, there are processes in almost every industry that you can learn from, modify to fit your needs and thus use in a completely unrelated business.

What I seldom mention is that you can’t let yourself think you’re so smart that you let your guard down.

While the Motley Fool has a point, neither they nor I would suggest that literacy on any topic is a bad idea.

The bad stuff occurs when you stop doing what got you to the point of being literate

Dancing with “who brung ya”
Another thing to watch out for as you educate yourself is deciding (or just “forgetting”) to stop doing the stuff to communicate, support and enthrall customers.

No matter how smart you become, you still have to take care of customers. No matter how far ahead of the second place player you are, you still have to do what got you to number one.

If you aren’t yet number one, you’ve gotta keep doing the things that keep you climbing, much less the things that the current number one is too lazy or sleepy to do.

Lazy? Sleepy? Too smart?
We’ve talked about lazy and sleepy plenty of times. I won’t belabor them.

When you get “too smart”, bad things are almost certain to start happening. Even worse, if you really think you’re that smart, you might ignore a failure as an aberration.

You might lose your business “mojo” and start making assumptions rather than testing the market, your marketing, or that formula for Flubber.

You might think you’re “Too big to fail”.

Getting better
Focus on getting smarter, but also on getting better.

It’s not worth the time to get smarter if you don’t use what you learn. Think back over your year.

How many things have you done to make your business better? To make yourself better?

Not just reading what will make you better, but DOING it…

Look, even Tom Peters and Dan Kennedy have their bad days. Just the other day, Dan commented that he had a bad day because he only completed 11 of the 12 tasks scheduled for the day.

He called his day “Unsatisfactory.”

I hold myself to a pretty high standard, and like you, Tom and Dan, I fail myself as well.

The difference between most people and Dan is that 11 of 12 is a great day for most people. For that matter, 6 of 12 is probably a great day for most.

Looking at 11 of 12 as unsatisfactory from a “this was my plan, but this is what happened” point of view is what keeps someone as amazingly smart as Dan from getting sleepy about his business.

Overconfidence
The gist of the Motley Fool article is this, and I quote:

“In 1998, the hedge fund LTCM, staffed thick with Ph.D.s and two Nobel laureates, exploded amid an almost incomprehensible amount of leverage. Behind the failure was raging overconfidence.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett said this about the firm profiled in the article:

“They probably have as high an average IQ as any sixteen people working together in one business in the country … just an incredible amount of intellect in that group. Now you combine that with the fact that those sixteen had extensive experience in the field they were operating in … in aggregate, the sixteen probably had 350 or 400 years of experience doing exactly what they were doing. And then you throw in the third factor: that most of them had virtually all of their very substantial net worths in the business … And essentially they went broke. That to me is absolutely fascinating.”

It’d be easy to dismiss anyone smart, or trying to get smarter, simply because these guys royally screwed up. Of course, if you think that way, you probably aren’t reading this.

I suggest you re-read that Buffett comment.

Like I said when we got started here…continue to educate yourself.

That *always* includes learning from someone else’s mistakes.

Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a business, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site or contact him via email at mriffey at flatheadbeacon.com.