4 Things that Made You Great in School but Hold You Back in Business

Anyone that knows me knows I’m a huge nerd! I’m obsessed with reading, podcasts, and online courses. Some online coaches and instructors are basically celebrities to me! That, coupled with my Type-A personality helped me breeze through college and graduate with the highest honors.

You might think that my nerdiness and love-affair with lifelong learning is a great asset to my business life. However, that hasn’t been the case. Here are

4 things that helped me in school but have held me back in my business life (And what I’m doing to break down those barriers)

1.Consumption Vs. Action

School is all about memorization. It’s about learning facts (That quite honestly can be easily found with a Google search).

Most courses turn us into passive participants. We’re meant to listen to a lecture, memorize that information and hope we do a good enough job to pass the tests ahead.

That doesn’t represent education as a whole, but it’s an overwhelming theme in what formal education looks like today.

I believe that’s exactly the reason the online coaching model is so successful! From an early age, we’re thought that to succeed we must know more. That’s why we put such high emphasis on grades as a measure of success. And when we start our business we tend to carry that mindset with us.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to keep up your skill set. However, this alone will do NOTHING for your business.

Entrepreneurs must take their knowledge and turn it into action. That’s why someone who’s successful beyond belief could teach the exact same system they used to get there and only have a handful of people who will succeed with their model.

So what can we do? Remember this, action wins every time so here’s my action item for you:

Think about a major area of focus in your business right now. Go back to the latest course, webinar or book you read on that topic. Make a list of 3 action items or techniques you got from those materials and go out there and put them to work!

2.Being Afraid of Getting It Wrong

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking…

I’m not sure I can implement those techniques. How do I know they will work?

It’s no surprise that all of us are so afraid of failing. School has programmed us to be terrified of failure.

If you’ve ever failed a class; you probably felt awful when you disappointed your family or got completely discouraged when you didn’t make the dance team or that role in the play you wanted to be a part of.  We’ve all had different experiences with failure, but one thing rings true.

Most people hate to fail because we see failure as something permanent.  But I guarantee you, every single person you admire has miserably failed at some point. The reason why you probably admire them is that they’ve made the leap anyways. Nobody will remember your failures if you look at them as opportunities to learn. You didn’t fail; you simply learned what not to do next time (Let’s call that market research!)

3.Expecting Immediate Gratification.

You studied two weeks and took that test you’ve been dreading for months. A week later you receive your results. Congratulations! You passed and can now celebrate your small victory.

Don’t you just wish business were that simple? The truth is most of the results you’re seeing right now in your business probably happened because of something you did three to six months ago.

Strategies take months to develop and carry out but we buy into “get rich quick schemes” and fall into the trap of believing we can make a full-time income doing part-time work. But those who run their business looking for instant gratification rarely give their ideas or strategies the time they need to succeed.

Develop a strategy, put it to work and give it the time it needs to get you the results you want.

Strategy + Implementation+ Patience = Business wins over time

4.Following All the Rules

Most college professors start their course by giving their students an outline of the rules and expectations they’ll have to stick to while in class. This can include a writing style to follow a certain dress code and even basic rules for behavior.

Something similar happens when we go out into the “real-world”, but these rules become more blurred every day.

Growing up I would’ve never imagined a business owner as someone with pink hair, a Mohawk or tattoos but people are increasingly pushing the boundaries of what was considered unacceptable and building crazy strong followings as a result of that.

Check out Lucy Perry an insanely successful international keynote speaker, consultant and author who happens to have crazy pink hair and wear leather jackets as her work attire

Moral of the story: You don’t have to be boring or corporate succeed! Do you have any little quirks or unique attributes that set you apart from everyone else? Why hide them?

Is there anything else you learned growing up that you had to un-learn when you started your business? Let me know in the comments below!