Learning to drive and learning to run a business are surprisingly similar endeavours.
When you learn to drive, you don’t know what you need to pay attention to. There are, seemingly, a million things going on, and some of them might kill you if you fail to heed them. This can cause a sense of panic in the beginner. When you know how to drive, you rely your experience to know what to pay attention to and what you can simply ignore or deal with without thinking about it.
Learning to run a business is similar. There are a million things that you could do, and some of them will kill your business if you fail to heed them. This can cause a sense of panic in the beginner. When you know how to run a business, you rely on your experience to tell you what you need to pay attention to and what you can simply ignore, delegate or outsource.
When you learn to drive, there are a lot of new habits that you need to build into automatisms. Learning to use the clutch to change gears rapidly while accelerating onto the motorway, surrounded by speeding cars, seems very difficult at first. But the more you do those things, the more they become automatic and unconscious. When you know how to drive, you don’t even really think about changing gears, you just do it.
Learning to run a business is similar. There are a lot of new habits that you need to build into automatisms. Learning to detect that the person in front of you is a lead, pitch them in the correct way, follow up, and close the sale, seems very difficult at first. But the more you do it, the more it becomes automatic and unconscious. When you know how to run a business, you don’t really think about pitching and closing sales, you just do it.
To learn to drive, you have to actually sit in a car and drive yourself. No amount of reading or talking about it will enable you to drive. You could study driving for years, and even watch someone else driving for years (most of us watch our parents driving for our entire childhood), and still it won’t replace the actual experience of driving. While it is possible to build car simulator, even that is a poor substitute for actual driving.
Learning to run a business is similar. You have to actually run a real business yourself. No amount of reading or talking about it will enable you to run a business. You can do all the MBAs you want, and study entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship for years, and still it won’t replace the actual experience of running a business. While it is theoretically possible to build a simulation of a business, it’s a poor substitute for actually running a business.
The best approach for learning to drive is to get an experienced driving instructor who will sit in the car with you and figure out what you know and what you need to learn, construct a teaching plan personalised to you, teach you those things, demonstrate them when it helps, and help you practice them over and over again in a safe environment, watching out for things that might kill you. Because this approach works, it is used throughout the world.
The best approach for learning to run a business is similar. You get an experienced mentor or coach or close advisor who will be lightly involved in the business, who will figure out what you really need to know next and point you in that direction, who helps you work through tricky business issues, and who watches out for things that might kill your business and that you haven’t spotted. This is much less widely used in business than indriving, perhaps because good business coaches are much more rare than good driving instructors. But driving schools for business are getting more common every day.
There is a difference between learning to drive and learning to run a business. In business, there is no such thing as a safe environment. You’re on the motorway from day one. And most people drive their first business without an instructor by their side.
Thoughts from 2018:
Not much to add to this article! I still think this is a good and useful analogy for learning to run businesses, and the best ways I have observed to train entrepreneurs are indeed experiential and based on working on a real business.