I have learnt a lot in the last almost 4yrs as an entrepreneur, I thought I was knowledgeable, and maybe I was, but the words, “see thou a man that is wise in his own eyes, there is more hope for a fool than him” – make more sense to me by the day. When you begin to know, you realize that the more you know, the more there is to know. Real knowledge is a by product of the experience of others. The gap between hypothesis and theory is bridged by experience – repeated experiments. He who would be knowledgeable must be willing to either learn from a lab mice, or be one. I daresay, better is the grace of humility to learn from the lab rat, than the grace of courage to be one yourself. The complete life however, must balance these means.
About 3yrs ago, I was quite broke – broke as N40,000 could be what 9 of us shared in a month. I was doing everything I knew to do to keep afloat. I had a team of guys working with me then as well as volunteers, and it was getting difficult to manage things and keep everybody together. We had sent out lots of proposals, were engaged in different small projects, but not so many results. Somewhere along the line, I stumbled on this book, that we are reading till this year ends. I decided not to read it alone, but to do a group effort with all my colleagues. It was just 3 days ago, that it dawned on me fully that it was less than 3 months from when we started the group reading, that a series of opportunities began to flood us all. We have never attributed the deluge to the book we had read that had tuned us to thinking and acting in a certain way. I thought it was serendipity, but I guess it was actually a science. The ride to wealth and fame was stalled only when we left the creative mind frame and became competitive. I have resumed reading this book again, this time not with 9 people, but with 175 people so far on my database who sent me an email, and I forwarded the book to them. In case you are thinking of joining us, here are some things we have learnt in the last 4 days.