Always err on the side of action
“She was proud to support her husband’s dream of building a great business. But five years is a long time to watch someone focus on his company at the expense of everything–everything–else.”
Confessions of an Entrepreneur’s Wife is quite a thrilling read about the detriments of entrepreneurship – especially the toll it takes on one’s family.
What made it all the more interesting for me was a different point though. The author had at that point been a business journalist for a dozen years and had written a couple of books about managing start-ups.
Yet, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her and her family when her husband decided to start a company.
“Watching Bill navigate the entrepreneurial life, I see now just how little I really knew about starting and building a business.”
She had read a lot and even written a book about entrepreneurship before. Despite all that intellectual knowledge, she was overwhelmed with unforeseen and new experiences and emotions upon living through it.
In every discipline, there are some concepts you absolutely have to grasp, some things you have to know in order to do anything useful. It may just not be as much as we are always told. First-hand experience trumps a lot of theoretical advice as you ultimately learn best not from somebody else’s failures but from your own.
I have always been interested in reading about lots of different disciplines and experiences. I have to take heed of not falling into this overconfidence fallacy by which you think you know enough (to succeed) about some discipline or business just by having read all there is about it.
In order to truly understand and advance, always err on the side of action.
