How many times have you heard, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? I personally have heard this hundreds of times. Let’s take it a few steps further and say, “Who knows you and where are they now?” Just knowing someone or something is just a small part of the equation. It’s also realizing that the knowledge you have came from someone else.

I remember my dad used to tell me not to give out my knowledge to anyone, because that person would become twice as smart as I was. He reasoned that they would have my knowledge added to their knowledge, therefore it was better for me to listen and learn so I would have the upper hand. Well Dad, I listened and learned quite a bit but somehow I think I could have learned more.

Interaction and sharing knowledge leads to more knowledge that can bring out ideas to possibly lead you down different pathways. If we are open to these new discussions, we will find ourselves exploring more avenues. Surrounded by people with the knowledge we need, we can learn more and share what we have.

A friend of mine called it “co-opertition”, where two or more companies competing in a similar geographic location or trade come together to share ideas and knowledge. Very similar to the associations and buying groups we support today. Which groups do you belong to? What knowledge are you giving and what knowledge are you receiving?

In the last 20+ years, the most important thing I've realized is this: once I finally started to spread the knowledge my dad advised I should keep to myself, I received four times the knowledge back in return. With that added knowledge, I have four times more to share, which will potentially give me that much more knowledge to receive. So don’t just sit in a chair on the sidelines watching and wasting your opportunities to learn. Get up and start sharing!

Happy Sharing,
Moe Lastfogel
​moe@retailobserver.com

Often, the cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing In business, you are taught that every decision and move your company makes will have financial implications. Those decisions, if not carefully made, could set a dire course for the fate of your company. Therefore, it is perceived that there is a high cost for being wrong, so often times business owners live in that fear every day.

However, being wrong is actually an essential part of learning. We get scared because we fear the cost of experimenting. Part of this is that we don’t often realize how cheap it is to test most of our ideas. But the bigger problem with experimenting is psychological – the realization that we might be wrong.

Kathryn Shulz, author of Being Wrong, explains why this is such a problem for many people: “In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity, but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. In this rather despairing view – and it is a common one – our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings. Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition... Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.”

At what stage in our life did we start believing that we need to be perfect at everything we do? That we need to achieve our goals without failure, without challenges and without everything going according to plan?

In the real world, we need to be wrong, not deterred, just wrong sometimes.

We need to take risks, put ourselves out there, live on the edge, and try things that we will not master upon our first attempt. We need to push our comfort zones to get ahead.

In other words, being wrong is the most beneficial and natural way to learn, not only in our personal lives but in the business world as well.

Happily Wrong (sometimes),
Moe Lastfogel
​moe@retailobserver.com