Lessons from Chef Bamba
You are never too knowledgeable to re-learn old lessons
Contents
Sep 19, 2019, 09:40
Entrepreneurship is like school. Afropreneurship even more so. You learn by iteration and internalisation. Whenever you think that you are too knowledgeable to “make a mistake” is when you are most vulnerable. The upside of this coin is that the opportunities to learn, grow and improve are as plenteous as there are minutes in a day (1440 – if you were wondering). Every journey you set out on will bring unknown twists and turns. And by definition, a journey – “an act of traveling from one place to another”, should be the daily objective of every person, let alone business person. At the end of the day, one needs to be able to look back on that day and conclude that “I am further than when the day started”. If that is not the case, then the day may represent a missed opportunity – one that should not be missed tomorrow.
Corner-Cutting-Counterbalance
I learned this lesson again yesterday. Without going into too much detail, I set myself back 2 months on a project simply because I did not take the necessary precautions to ensure that my safety systems were in place and functioning. This is a simple principle. It can mean a simple check before undertaking a new task in the day or it can be a complex set of pre-inspection tests before a new day of production. It may take only a few seconds to do or it may be hours long. Whichever way, omitting this step may result in devastating consequences. Ensuring that safety systems are operational can be something as simple as verifying that your back-up software is ACTUALLY backing up. Failure to this periodically will invariably lead to you exclaiming – at one point in your life or another – “But I REALLY thought it was working”. And the old man Murphy reassures us that this will occur at the most inconvenient possible time.
Don’t cut corners to save time or money. And if you MUST cut a corner, ensure that you are fully aware of the potential set-backs should something go wrong and that you are “cool” with that. Call it “Corner-cutting- counterbalance”. The truth is safety systems (like seat-belts and parachutes)
