RULE TO BREAK

“You can’t learn anything from a fool”

Think about this for a minute. Everyone really smart and successful must have been taught or managed at some point by someone less capable than themselves. Were all Einstein’s teachers cleverer than him? I doubt it.

Your boss may not be as smart as you, but hopefully they are good at managing people or asking the right questions to stretch your brain – and there’s a lot to be said for that. Better that than a smart boss with an attitude problem.

And a less than superbright boss or teacher doesn’t have to hold you back. You just have to find new ways to learn from them.

So watch them, assess them, evaluate them. Work out where they’re going wrong, as well as where they’re getting it right (when they do) and think about how you would avoid making that same mistake yourself.

Thinking this deeply about it can only help reinforce the lessons for you, so really they’re doing you a favour by making you think harder and more clearly.

There’s a UK corporate film company that was set up in the 1970s based entirely on teaching people through others’ mistakes. The company was hugely successful because it amusingly showed the wrong way to handle a situation (in sales, management or whatever). By seeing what mistakes to avoid, the tens of thousands of trainees who watched these films learnt how to get it right.

So you can do the same thing. See a weak boss or an ineffectual teacher as a learning opportunity. Work out a better way to explain the concept your teacher has just stumbled through, or plan out how you would have gone about managing that project. These are the lessons that will really stick, so be enthusiastic about being able to learn in this way.

Every day we learn from other people’s mistakes, big and small, whether they are trying to teach us or not. Life is packed with opportunities, and all you need to do is analyze where other people have gone wrong to be able to learn from them rather than getting incredibly frustrated. And it’s a good thing too. After all, mistakes are a valuable learning tool, but there’s no need for you to make all of them yourself.