I don’t think my son is particularly unique about this. After all, I did this for much of my life until I got smarter.
He tends to be compelled to do things without checking out whether there’s another way toward getting advice.
He believes he needs to figure it out by himself, not realizing that it’s often easier to learn lessons to the lives of others and their experience.
It doesn’t mean that he needs to always take their advice but it’s helpful to listen to it because it allows you to prepare for contingencies.
After all, surprises are rarely good surprises.
For you, at work, people constantly reinvent the wheel.
People often go through the same conversations time and again year after year as though they’ve never been had before.
There is no collective historical memory of past decisions made in the result of them, whether positive or not.
There are false messiahs, of course. I think of the movie, “Wall Street,” where the Charlie Sheen character follows the Michael Douglas character because he represents glamour, excitement and success vs the slow and steady of many of the people in his office.
He doesn’t see the warnings and if he does, he doesn’t listen to them, even when they come from his father.
If you open yourself up to learning lessons from others, you can save yourself your firm a lot of heartache, pain and suffering.
Ⓒ The Big Game Hunter, Inc., Asheville, NC 2020
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a career and leadership coach who worked as a recruiter for more than 40 years. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with more than 1800 episodes and his newest show, “No BS Coaching Advice” and is a member of The Forbes Coaches Council.
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