Negligence, finally

It is often said that you learn the most from your mistakes.

Indeed in the startup world I have dished out this wisdom to CEOs over and over, primarily to prevent them from being too cautious and therefore doomed.

In startups, each mistake is usually fatal. So a good CEO, not having enough time to learn all the lessons by failure (that would take 500 years), must learn to discern those that should be listened to. And then listen to them.

Any reading on the subject has little value other than alerting the student to the subjects that should be discussed with mentors.

The successful CEOs, through their mentors, absorb the lessons of generations of CEOs and their collective mistakes, usually by situation analysis (“what do I do now?”).

Even so, success also requires luck. The removal of controllable mistakes is a necessary but not sufficient condition for startup success.

I suspect that there are other business activities where the excision of avoidable mistakes actually guarantees success.

My guess is that these lower return activities can be taught as trades in a class room. They are so structured as professions that they only allow for mistakes by negligence.