Truth 8. Be prepared to profit from your mistakes

It's not enough to make mistakes; you also have to be prepared to learn from them. There's an old story about a successful entrepreneur who spoke to a group of business school students. They asked him for the secret to how he earned his wealth. "Good decisions," he said. But the students pressed further: "How did you learn to make good decisions?" His answer, "Experience." But, asked one student, "Where did you get this experience?" His answer, "Bad decisions."

This is true only if you have a process to learn from your mistakes.

In his book, The Go Point, Michael Useem tells the story of Lenovo CEO Liu Chuanzhi, who founded one of the world's largest computer companies. Chuanzhi was not trained in business. He was working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1984 when he formed the company that would become China's largest personal computer producer. How did Chuanzhi learn how to build a successful business with little or no business training? At the end of every week, Chuanzhi met with his top aides to review the major decisions they had made in the past week.

Systematically looking at their past decisions and learning from them was the equivalent of a business degree. They just kept getting better until they became one of the world's largest personal computer companies. In 2005, Lenovo acquired the personal computer business of IBM, the granddaddy of the personal computer. With constant practice and assessment of its decisions, Lenovo created a company that could take on the world. No matter where you start, you can keep improving your game by working on your faults and learning from your past mistakes and successes.

Take time on Friday afternoons or Monday mornings to review your decisions from the past week. You can do this individually or with other members of your team. What decisions did you make? How could you have made them better? How will this experience change the way you approach similar decisions in the future?