Hmmm. Yet another quote that uses circular logic which is the only type of logic that I enjoy. I guess the only reason the elderly have good judgment is that they have been burned so many times that they learned. Sure you can teach children right from wrong, but until they have a few really bad experience and suffer some really real consequences that they feel, they might never learn.
I remember the old days when I wanted to make money fast. I worked hard on my paper route and lawn mowing business. I saved up money and purchased a penny stock. It went out of business a few years later and I lost everything. It was after that experience I decided to be a lot more cautious about investing. Now, I have a very stable portfolio of stocks that are mostly the same that Warren Buffet owns. Sure, none of them are fast growth stocks, but they are stable, and I made a little money from them too.
In my business, I have learned a lot too. When I started many years ago, I thought that you just set up certain functions and they maintain themselves. I put a bunch of people on a directory and thought that I had a directory. I didn’t realize that I would have to continue giving 3000 free listings every year for the rest of my life which is very time consuming. What I did was to add 4000 all at once, and then do nothing for two years until the total head count on the directory got really low. Now, I have a monthly system of putting new people on the directory in the beginning of each month. My behavior now demonstrates my realistic and good judgement which arose from being an idiot in the past and learning from my mistakes.
But, what about your business? Do you learn from your mistakes or are you oblivious and keep making the same mistakes over and over without realizing? Try to learn from your bad judgment and refine your decision making skills as that is what defines a good business person. If you have made twenty wrong turns in the past, and now know the right place to turn, you are a business person. If your correct turn changes over time and you adapt swiftly to the change, then you are a real business person who understands that change is constant.
Just remember — the difference between a successful business person and a very successful business person is that the very successful one compares a much larger number of options and says “no” a higher percentage of the time!