Know a Bit About Everything

Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 03:23pm by David Askaripour in Life

One of my favorite qualities of an entrepreneur is the thirst for knowledge. As babies we are raised to listen to our parents, go to elementary school, go to middle school, high school, and then college.

Throughout that time, we all learn a great deal of information. From our parents to our professors, our minds absorb millions of life lessons and useful facts, theories, hypotheses, insights, etc… It’s a beautiful thing: learning as we grow.

Though our parents and school systems have done their best (or in some cases, a poor job) in teaching us information that they deemed important and necessary to living a good life… our learning can not stop there.

I am a strong believer that our parents and professors can only teach us so much in life. We can not and must not fall victim into thinking that learning stops after your graduate from college – that’s ridiculous.

Many of us young entrepreneurs are either 1.) currently in college 2.) recently graduated and are working for a company, or 3.) graduated and now are working on building a business. Regardless of your current situation as an entrepreneur, it’s extremely important that “you” start educating yourself on a daily basis.

This is a very crucial part of our lives: our 20s! There is no time to waste in this decade. As an entrepreneur – heck, as a human being – you have to constantly seek knowledge and increase your intellectual brainpower.

If someone asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, that’s OK. But what’s not OK is the lack of pursuit to learn about that particular topic. As an entrepreneur, you have to become an intellectual. I define an intellectual as a person who know at least a little bit about many, many topics; enough to speak intelligently about those subjects.

There have been many occasions when I have been clueless on topics that I have come across from clients, associates, and even random people. Anytime this happens, I simply take a mental (or a real note) note to set aside some time that day to do some research into that subject. So the next time I come across such a topic, I’ll be able to understand what’s going on and at the very least, be able to add a thing or two to the discussion.

As an entrepreneur you’re going to come across many people with various levels on expertise and intelligence; it’s in your best interest as an entrepreneur and simply as a person trying to educate themselves, to learn as much as you possibly can – forever.

So the next time you are clueless about something (anything!), do some research. Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for your research and will go a long way educating you on various interesting topics.

7 Comments

Leave a Comment