Learn Baby Learn

I sit tonight in my top-secret, subterranean business coaching grotto and contemplate the complexities of running a business. My coaching grotto is like the Batcave where Batman hangs out, just without all the cool gadgets. But I digress.

Okay, I’m still sitting in the coaching grotto at 11:30 p.m., trying to figure out how to improve the issue of unconscious incompetence that many entrepreneurs, executives, and business owners have.  Running a business can be a highly complex endeavor indeed. Yet many business owners and entrepreneurs are not prepared for the challenge. According to Lending Tree in an April 2025 report, 21.5% of private sector businesses in the U.S. will fail in their first year. After five years, nearly 50% will shutter their doors, and after 10 years, over 65% are gone. More than 1 in 5 U.S. businesses fail in the first year. Why is that?

I believe the answer is simple but hard for many to swallow.

People are lazy. They are unwilling to do the work required to build a new business. It requires work if the business is a franchise, a brick-and-mortar, a pure start-up, or a business of any kind—hard work.

People are self-imposed stupid: Many are smart, bright, hard-working people who are dead set on working in the business with what they knew when they started their business, satisfied with doing things the way it’s always been done. As a Master Business Coach, I do a lot of seminars and workshops. I had a guy disrupt a huge sales and business development class. I finally stopped the proceedings and asked him what the issue was. He proudly stood and proclaimed that he didn’t need this training. He had been in sales for 25 years. So there. As calmly as possible, I gave him a challenge. I said, “Sir, my question is this: Have you been in sales for 25 years, or one year 25 times?”  In other words, I asked if he had spent those twenty-five years continually learning about sales, or had he gone to one sales training session twenty-five years ago, which was (in his mind) all he needed.

He shut up after that.

However, the challenge is valid. Did you go to a seminar years ago and decide that’s all you needed? In today’s business environment, if you’re not constantly learning, you’re continually looking for a job. And if you cannot be a constant and consistent learner, you’ll never be hired. Your endeavors will always fail. You must learn to compete. You must learn to stay afloat in most cases.

You must learn and keep learning to excel.

Finally, People don’t do their research: Translated, people do not learn, think, and challenge their ideas for a business, and all the steps necessary to take on the challenge of business ownership. A failed business could have been saved many times by the owner simply learning as much as possible about the business and its industry and writing a business plan.

The Japanese have a business philosophy focusing on continuous learning. It’s called KAIZEN, which means continuous and never-ending improvement. Investopedia.com explains it like this. “Kaizen is often used in business to describe a philosophy of constant improvement and growth, involving all employees from the top to the bottom. It encourages incremental improvements and always strives for better practices.”

I can usually tolerate the illogical actions and thoughts that I am sometimes confronted with. As a Master Business Coach, I work with people in business who are doing a great job, while others probably shouldn’t be in business, and it gets to me sometimes. Why don’t people want to learn? Is it ego, stupidity, laziness, or an undiscovered human genome called the I KNOW EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW gene?  We know clinically that humans can learn and continue to learn until we decide not to learn.

Dedicate yourself to learning something new every day. For over forty years, I’ve made it a habit to dedicate at least 200 hours annually to continuous learning. And the effort pays off year after year.

At this time of night, the Coaching Grotto is very dark and quiet. I haven’t yet figured out the business conundrum of people investing their life savings in a business that they won’t research and then continually learn about.

But I have a plan. My goal is to rest and relax, then go out into the light of a new day, see what the world has to offer, and find opportunities to help businesspeople avoid becoming statisticians.

Be open. Be curious and learn, baby, learn.