When "Sharpening Your Axe" Can Kill Your Business


by Carl Coddington - Date: 2007-03-13 - Word Count: 513 Share This!

You can almost always count on a bad metaphor or "label" to screw a person or business up. Once somebody learns an expression or cliché, they like to sound smart by trying to solve the world's problems with it. As the old saying goes "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

For much of my professional life I was a teacher and college professor. One of the most important things I learned throughout my experience was that there is more to teaching than throwing around expressions and phrases. Teaching is an involved process of breaking down subjects into small organized concepts and showing how those concepts relate, in context, to the "student's" life.

In the adult "real world", we don't have teachers, we have bosses. We have bosses who feel that they have to be smarter and wiser than us. Because our bosses aren't educated in the field of teaching, they normally don't know how to "teach" their employees how to do tasks in an organized manner and, more importantly, they don't know how to relay to their employees what they really want.

Just like our bosses, we have many people trying to "teach" us. Infomericals try to teach us how to buy their products, health and fitness experts teach us how to eat healthy and lose weight, and Internet Guru's "teach" us how to do Internet Marketing and how to build a successful business on-line.

Unfortunately for us, we are very used to playing the role of the faithful student. We listen to some "non-teacher" who tells us to read their articles and to buy their products and, if we do all that and more, we will be successful. We are told that we have to continually "sharpen our axes" if we want to have the knowledge we need to succeed.

There might be a problem with sharpening our axe if we don't know where the sharpener is. How do we know what articles and products are going to be best for our business.

In many cases, most of the articles and ads we read are meant to speak to our emotions and not to our logic. It's the emotion that gets us all excited and ready to invest a lot of time and money in our business. But… What are we really investing our time in money in? Should we listen to a "guru" who does not know us or our business?

I say no!

When starting and growing a business we need a teacher/mentor. We need someone who knows our business, who has been there before, and knows the exact steps to take to grow a successful business. We need someone who is going to save us 1,000's of hours and dollars.

There is a non-profit organization on the Internet called SCORE. It is located at score.org. It is a website full of retired successful business people who want to be mentors. They don't ask for money and give great advice. You should check that site out right now. But first, feel free to sign up for our free business school at www.promoinnovations.com We will assign you a mentor.


Related Tags: home business, entrepreneur, internet, success, business, newsletter, resource, free business, advic

Carl Coddington has been an Internet business entrepreneur since 1994. He has been helping thousands of people and businesses succeed on the Internet through his highly successful newsletter and free business school at http://www.promoinnovations.com

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