“Degrees teach you to follow the rules. Wealth teaches you to break them.” - Tim Denning
Over the past years, I have figured out something which has made my business life more complete. I would like to share this experience with you, as I believe that it will bring more success to your life.
I have met many people who believe that career or a leadership role are linked to age. That it takes time to grow and mature and that only with life experience you will be good enough to take over that important role.
Honestly, I have always disliked such statements. Especially in my twenties when I felt like old people wanted to stop me from succeeding. They wanted to dump their limiting beliefs on me and slow down my life and my career.
I still disagree with such limiting beliefs, as I recognize that each individual has their own way of living life, their own pace, and their life phases. The same thing can be right for individuals at a different moment in their lives - or maybe even never. We cannot know and judge from the outside.
Yet, look at Tim Denning’s quote. It holds an aspect which is very true.
With life experience, you will make better decisions. It will be easier for you to know what to do and you will know why you want to do it that way. Moreover, you will defend your choices and views against other opinions.
And that feels like gold!
The younger you are the more you rely on what others teach you. This implies that you adopt their views and beliefs. It is hard to question them as you have not experienced anything similar on your own, so you must decide whether they are trustworthy and whether you can imagine what they say. Especially if their theories and ideas are printed in a book, you will take the words for THE TRUTH.
Then you enter business life and apply what you learned. You do everything by the book (you own a degree!) and you are convinced that this is right. It is easy to observe colleagues or leaders around you who do it differently. You will assume that they never learned it correctly or that they are weak in their role.
As the years pass, your horizon broadens and you start to recognize different work and leadership styles. You start to understand that different beliefs and different paths can lead to the same destination. Or that there are always different ways of doing work without one being inferior to the other. They are just different.
Now comes the fun part! The part where older people say that they don’t want to be young and immature again, if they had the choice.
You have grown to be confident in your thinking. You have gained competences. You believe that you know how the world operates and you start to live by your own terms.
As life phases are different for each of us, I cannot say when this moment arrives for which individual. But it will come.
And it is arrogant to think that you are at that state after one year in business. Believe me, even if you are incredibly fast paced, one year of real practice is not what I am talking about. There are quite a few employees who I need to convince of this point - especially some young self-confident men.
So, once you are at that point of competency and confidence, you will start to experiment. You will dare to put in your flavor. You will dare to show your personality.
In turn, this new attitude will further enhance your growth and success.
That is why we can observe that wealthy people live by their own rules. They know when to comply to fit in with society while breaking those rules that try to limit their very personal universe. They create the world they want to operate in.
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