The price of humility

This is one of the most important words in the Entrepreneurial World. Being humble is to avoid bragging about your success, never feeling that you know everything and that you are above everyone just because you have something they don't; unfortunately not a lot of people like to practice this and they pay the price with their health, wasted effort and peace of mind.

Why humility is so important? 

Because it affects everything you do in your daily life and it can really affect the way you interact with other people and the results you get when them. Lets look at some of the most glaring examples:

Example #1 Teamwork

Regardless of the path you choose to walk on, you will always need help. You can't do everything alone, it's just not physically possible and it has serious health consequences if you try to do it. Depending of your level of humility, you can choose between accepting help and work towards a bigger and beneficial goal or refuse help and try to do everything yourself (and get tired, frustrated before achieving anything)

Usually, one of the greatest weaknesses of new Entrepreneurs is that they don't want help, either for fear but usually because they think that people don't know what he is doing and he/she alone is enough to handle all...epic mistake.

Example #2 Learning 

As I already mentioned on the Learning your way article, learning is very important in the Entrepreneurial life. What we learn, how we learn it and how we apply it depends on our level of humility regarding our knowledge. Entrepreneurs and Employees alike need to know a little bit about everything so they can overcome the daily obstacle. The people that think that they know everything and that they don't need to keep updating their knowledge are the first to go down when things turn ugly; that or they learn through hard hits rather than with words...hardly the most happy learning experience.

Accepting that you still need to learn and asking for help to others doesn't make you less intelligent, in reality it means that you strive for something better and that you are highly interested on keep going with your projects.

Be humble enough to recognize your mistakes

Remember that humility is not to think less of yourself, it's to think of yourself less. Be humble enough to recognize your mistakes, ask for help when you need it and most importantly to help others in need. After all, karma, believe or not, it's a very strong thing in the Entrepreneurial World and what you do to others and for others will be returned to you. 

The Never Ending Improvement Process

As you know, one of the fundamental things in life is improvement. It goes by many names such as updating, renovation, actualization, enhancement, etc. and according to this Wikipedia article, What is Improvement? it simply means to "get better".

Everyone needs improvement; we improve by learning, exercising, creating, praying and/or a really wide array of activities; unfortunately, we can also choose to not improve. What happens when we decide to avoid improving?

Stagnation

This means staying passive and avoid action, become passive and wait for life to pass you by. Absolutely not the way of living any person should want. I strongly suggest you avoid stagnation because it makes your life miserable, sad and highly unbearable since you stick to the same routine over and over again.

But how can I avoid falling into Stagnation? It's fairly simple; I noticed that by following the rules above you were able to keep improving and actively avoid stagnation.

The Never Ending Improvement Rules

These are the 4 rules I put on practice to keep on going and be a better person, employee, entrepreneur, leader, son, etc in my life and to avoid stagnation at all costs. They are the following:

1. Never stop learning!
2. Practice what you learned as soon as you can.
3. Find creative ways to do the same things.
4. Share your knowledge.

These rules are self explanatory and I believe that if you apply them every time you learn then you are going to leave with a very valuable lesson each time, not only with the theory.

What I did to improve

As I said on previous posts, I don't know much about the blogging world but I made a vow to keep improving no matter what so I just want to tell you that to honor this post, I will be updating and improving not only my writing but also my blog (overall style, links, etc).

You may see a lot of changes around but don't worry, they are all proof that this blog was caught up in the "Never Ending Improvement" process and will be a better blog each time you see it.

Also, to share my knowledge and to practice what I learned about Blogging, I created a simplified version of this blog on Tumblr. Here is the link: Entrepreneur Transition on Tumblr so I can go closer to you via Facebook and Twitter. Also, I created a Google+ Page of the blog and you can subscribe to it by clicking "follow" on the button below my profile.

It's amazing to see all the things I did after learning, practicing and find creative ways to contact you. Thanks for making me improve and I hope I can help you do the same too!

Out of the Limbo step 2, Learning your way

The importance of learning

Learning is one of the most important aspects of life as a whole; it helps you overcome great obstacles, make good decisions and surprisingly live stress free. Usually we aren't too eager to learn, in fact most people only do so to get a title, the diploma or get some kind of social standing.

Unfortunately this kind of behavior extends to all the aspects of our life and suddenly, we don't want to learn anything...

Even when learning is something simple and effortless, we usually take the long and hard way, suffering disappointments, anger, sadness, desperation and depression instead of going the easy way and learn what we must (even if we don't want to at first)

You can learn a lot from small things

I want to share a simple example of something that happened to me just moments ago:

I was checking my traffic sources 3 days ago when I noticed that I had two suspicious traffic sources on my blog. I didn't know what they were but instead of trying to learn more about them (since they were from Russia and from places I never visited) I decided to go the long hard way...I waited 3 days not knowing what to do and then I clicked on them instead of searching what they were first.

As you can imagine those were spam sites. I worried a lot because my blog would be cataloged as spam, because I should have never clicked on those pages, I panicked because I couldn't find an option to block or delete them...in short, I gained a lot of stress and desperation because I didn't take the time to learn.

Afterwards I searched in Google what happened and I found this simple but lifesaving blog: "How to Stop/Block Unwanted Referral URLs Entering Your Blogger Blog". Simple and sweet; if I had taken the time to search for it and learn what happened with my traffic sources I would have saved a lot of stress and 3 days of uncertainty and doubts.

Now, at 11:40 PM that I'm writing this instead of going to sleep, I learned about the great impact little things have in one's life and how having a will to learn can change a situation from horribly bad to good. If I had taken 10 minutes to search, I would have saved 3 days of suffering.

The 5 Entrepreneur Learning rules

This same situation happens very often in an Entrepreneur life. Since everything around us change constantly we have to keep up to date, learn every day or die trying.

There are 5 Learning rules that I noticed that if I follow them I get great rewards, more so if I'm in doing something entrepreneur related. I want to share them with you:

1. Focus your learning: Know exactly what you need and learn it.
2. Go step by step: Don't try to learn everything at once, it's bad to mental health. Learn by setting yourself small but attainable goals.
3. Go beyond: If something is interesting for you, look for more info, discover more.
4. Search beyond your first reference: Usually we don't go beyond the first search results (sometimes we don't even go beyond Wikipedia). We are losing a lot of important information by not searching more.
5. Find a practical use: Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is useless. Find a way to practice what you learned!

Remember that knowledge can even save your life if you learn what you need and how to apply it. Never stop learning (regardless if you choose to be an Entrepreneur or not) and remember:

"There is more than one way to learn, choose the one that suits you best but please, choose one before you are left behind"