How To Win at Startups by Learning Fast

Learning’s something that we take for granted.

It starts as soon as you’re born. You learn to writing. To read. To speak. Even to think.

Then school, college. You start to learn higher level skills. Maybe some math. Or…the recorder.

And college. Well, that should be more of the same. You should become a voracious learner. Right?

What’s so wrong with college

For most of us, college isn’t really about learning skills. In fact, it’s usually secondary to learning general human functions. It’s where you grow up.

Instead of learning to solve big problems, we’re learning to play beer pong.

It’s more than possible to scrape your way through college — do well, even — without doing much work.

Professors want you to do well. They set the same exams every year. They’re judged by your success. You get the drill.

Sometimes it seems like there’s not even a point in trying to excel. After all, if you’re scraping a B without trying, what’s encouraging you to do better?

After college? It gets worse

So if college isn’t for learning, what happens next?

That’s usually when your learning really starts.

You have to learn skills. A lot of them.

• Life skills
  Like setting up and paying for utilities. Paying the rent. Finding an apartment. Arranging movers.
• Social skills
  Making friends when proximity’s not on your side is way harder. Most kids come out of college with no idea.
• Job hunting skills
  Because college seems strangely lacking in those too. They’ll tell you roughly how to get a job, but nothing specific. That’d be too helpful, right?
• Applied academic skills
  The worst of all — learning how to actually apply any of the academic stuff you’ve been taught. Unless you were super lucky, you’ll have ended up being able to solve an equation on a whiteboard but have no idea what that means in real life.

Oh, and there’s that small task of working out who you are after college. Because being free from education for the first time tends to change a person.

Your likes, dislikes. Your values. You need to figure it all out.

And that’s all in the first few months. You’re really chucked in at the deep end.

Doing a startup makes everything worse

Wanna skip the job hunting and build your own company?

That’s what I did. And I’ll tell you now, the path’s fraught with danger.

Not only do you have to learn all that other stuff, but you need to be able to make decisions. Good ones. Really fast.

Startups are almost impossibly risky. So you’ll need a way to manage that risk. And great execution (through great decision making) is the best risk management there is.

That’s not even starting to think about the stuff you’ll need to know to actually run the damn thing. Accounting, fundraising, software development, hiring, firing. The list goes on.

The best founders have a passion for learning. In fact, I’d go as far as to say they have a hunger for it.

This weekend I’m getting back to basics. I’m building out a new site for my personal branding (hi!). I’m diving into WordPress for the first time in years.

I’m also migrating the HelpDocs homepage to a new web host, and playing with some IoT and AI stuff on the side. And I’ve still got the gym to look forward to.

I know very little about how to achieve most of those tasks. Yet. So much of my week’s going to be spent learning.

I don’t do these things just because I want to. There’s a compulsion. A drive to learn more.

Find that drive, apply it, and it’ll make you a better founder. It’s sure helped me.

Originally published at www.startingup.co.