Some lessons are best forgotten

A woman I mentored a while ago caught me up on her life recently and she offered an insight that everyone should gain at some point along the journey.

Smart woman, hard-working, energetic, and, as is the case with many entrepreneurs, she was pursuing a business model that wouldn’t work. It happens quite a bit, because not every great idea can be a great business. In her case, the product’s price and the profit margin were too low to cover all the overhead costs, which is a fatal flaw shared by many start-ups and about 99% of the internet companies I invested in during the 1990s.

After switching gears and changing direction, she described the new path she's on and sent me an upbeat update, including this priceless insight: “Currently unlearning everything I was taught to believe equals success and happiness, and learning that none of the things I thought would bring success and happiness are necessary for either of those things.”

I’m very happy for her, because that’s a bit of wisdom that many of us miss as we keep pursuing the wrong goals on the basis of flawed advice.

None of us gets through childhood without some adult telling us, “If you want to be X when you grow up, you have to Y.” And they’re adults, the big people in the room, the people who never ask us for advice and only give it, so they must know something. They tell us how to eat and how to behave and how to put on clean underwear before we get to the emergency room (or something like that) and how to build the financial security that we realize, in hindsight, they never achieved for themselves.

Some of the advice is useful, like looking both ways before crossing the street, but much of it is terribly flawed. Without question, though, the worst advice we ever get concerns one or both of our most important goals: success and happiness.

When we’re still young, we have no idea about this stuff. Even worse, some of the people who advise us have no idea, either, but they either don't realize it or they can't handle the truth. Looking back, we realize that the key to success we learned about at ten wasn’t based on the experience of the speaker, but rather on their own misconceptions about other people’s achievements.

Even worse, none of the pearls they cast before us applied to us and our lives. It was impossible, of course, because we hadn’t lived enough of our lives to have a clue. It takes at least a few decades, sometimes more, for us to gain enough experience and scars and perspective to understand the whole thing, and our progress is slowed along the way by bad advice from people who really didn’t know.

When we’re kids, we think adults have all the answers, mostly because they are bigger and stronger and older, but mostly because they keep telling us they have all the answers. When we become adults ourselves, we realize how little we know and how much we have to fake it on the path to making it. And that’s the point when all of us should be pausing like we’re in a sitcom and saying, “Wait a minute……….

"I’m older and more experienced than the person who told me how to live my life six decades ago and I still don't have a clue, so why do I think they knew anything at all? Maybe I should get off the path they prescribed when I was, what, ten?"

I'm very happy for my onetime colleague, needing less time than I did to take a fresh look at her own values and move forward with a plan of her own. “…none of the things I thought would bring success and happiness are necessary for either of those things.”

We gain knowledge by learning new things. We gain wisdom by learning which ones to forget.

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