MJ Gonzales │ExecutiveChronicles.com
No one will say that you shouldn’t take business class or prepare yourself in doing entrepreneurship. After all, no soldier will go to a war without weapons. Business is like a battlefield you know why you are there and what to do in case enemies attack you, but that doesn’t you are immune from failures. According to some business experts, it pays off to adapt a beginner’s mind.
In the 2005 commencement address of the late Steve Jobs at Standford University, former CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, he said that though it was humiliating and devastating that he kicked out from Apple before. After all, he’s the one who built it and gave great contribution to make it a lucrative brand. However, he shared that “getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened” to him.
“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life,” Jobs commented and shared that he built NeXT and Pixar, and found his wife when he was out from Apple.
“I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith,” Jobs added.
It’s true that becoming an entrepreneur from mere employee is liberating. Finally, you prove that you can be the boss of your own enterprise is possible when you learn and master your skills. Apparently, it also a good practice to welcome the idea that you don’t know everything. Huffington Post reported that there’s “power in ignorance,” which they connected to the beauty of adapting a beginner’s mind.
“The power of ignorance frees one of fear, frees one to rely on one’s native talents,” a quote from Gerry Spence, lawyer and poet, that Huffington shared. “No one is more powerful than the kid in the trenches who has no understanding of pain or death. That’s why we send young men to war.”
The report also suggested that thinking you are expert would also shed your chance to adapt in ever dynamic entrepreneurial society. Possibly, you miss to discover the world because you just stick in how you would like to see it. Thus, if you desire to become successful in business or any endeavors you want to pursue, breakaway from your default assumptions so what you see are not limitations, but possibilities.
“Beginner’s mind, then, is a practice of approaching our experiences empty of assumptions. Essentially, beginner’s mind is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled up by the raw data of doing commerce and living life. In this way, we become more vulnerable to insight. Since we don’t claim to have come to the final answer, we can more readily welcome new ones,” Faisal Hoque, “Everything Connects” author and founder of Shadoka shared on Huffington.
