March 24, 2006

Cutting Your Learning Cycle is Critical as an Entrepreneur

Cutting down the amount of time for learning is critical to your success as an entrepreneur. You must become proficient at your craft before you go broke.

Learning is a continuous cycle. Throughout our entire lives we must learn. If we don’t learn we stagnate and actually start moving backwards. Everything and everyone around is always in motion moving forward.

If we believe we are standing still we are living in an illusion. We are actually moving backwards. There is no such thing as standing still. When you understand and use the learning cycle you can achieve mastery. This is absolutely critical to being a successful entrepreneur.

Let’s go through the learning cycle.

The first step in the learning cycle is that you are unaware or you are unconsciously incompetent. You don’t know that you don’t know.

Let’s say you have a job and you become more and more dissatisfied but you don’t know why. You think that by changing jobs you will find satisfaction. You then take action and get a new job. But once the romance of a new job wears off, you become dissatisfied again. The real solution to get rid of your job dissatisfaction is to have your own business. However at this point you are still unaware. You are unconscious incompetent.

Next you have the idea that maybe working in a job is wrong for you. You want to start your own business but you don’t know how or what business to start. You have now moved to step two of the learning cycle. You are now aware of what you want (to start a business) however you still don’t know how to proceed. At this stage you are conscious incompetent. In other words you know that you don’t know.

You continue on your journey to progress and start your business. You take some classes, read some books, listen to tapes and educate yourself on how to start and run a business. After absorbing all the material you learned you have reached step three of the learning cycle. You are now conscious competent. You now know what to do and how to do it. Now you know that you know how to be in business for yourself.

As a new entrepreneur you still stumble around in your business because it is not part of you yet. You continue to work your business and implement the concepts you learned in step three.

Then all of sudden you start doing what you learned automatically. You no longer think about what you are doing and are on autopilot. You have now achieved step four in the learning cycle. You are unconscious competent. This means you do without thinking. It is now part of you at the cellular level.

Then you start all over again. You may focus on a different aspect of your business which you haven’t learned yet. Maybe you figured out how to create a product but haven’t had success marketing it. So you become aware of your lack of ability to market your product and continue your enreprenuer training. You take a class in marketing and start implementing what you learned in your business. At first you have few results. Over time with enough practice you become an expert marketing your product.

To Continue Your Entrepreneur Training and become a better learner read chapter 4 in my book Wealth Without a Job. To learn even faster and easier, cutting your cycle time down even further Attend one of our trainings. This will definitely cut your learning cycle tremendously.

To Your Success,
Andy Fuehl