Dare to Know What You Don’t Know
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One of the biggest growth barriers that business owners face has nothing to do with weak sales, sloppy strategic planning or lackluster personnel. It’s a psychological hurdle: knowing what you don’t know.The ability to recognize holes in your knowledge — and find ways to plug them — propels your business. Otherwise, you might see yourself as a jack-of-all-trades and repeatedly take on duties for which you’re unqualified. Making decisions when you lack understanding or familiarity with the issues can lead to disastrous results. It sounds simple: Admit your weaknesses and address them. Yet when events unfold at breakneck speed, chief executives of young companies may feel that they lack the luxury of time to sit back, assess the situation, recognize their knowledge gaps and fill them. Overcome the obstacles What makes it so hard for founders to confront what they don’t know? For starters, they grow so accustomed to improvising that they assume they’ll learn whatever they need to know by doing. They assume part of running a growing business is rendering judgments without having all the answers. Have you fallen into this trap? See if the following statements sound familiar:
- I’ll never have all the information I’d ideally like to have, so I need to do my best with what I know.
- I don’t have anyone critiquing my performance every day. There’s no one around telling me, "You don’t know enough about this. Learn more before you plunge in."
- Launching a business is a leap of faith. I’m busy drumming up excitement in our future. Obsessing over what I don’t know isn’t going to help us grow.
- The processes they’ve adopted.
- The systems they use.
- The knowledge they draw upon.
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Articles in our Entrepreneur’s Resource Center appeared in print and online newsletters published previously by the foundation. More than 1,000 articles can be found in the categories below, addressing timeless challenges faced by entrepreneurs of all types.