Become a Beginner Again
August 18, 2026
“The power of starting from scratch.”
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One of the occupational hazards of being successful for a long time is that you can go days without doing anything you’re truly bad at.
Think about it.
If you’ve owned a business for 20 or 30 years, you’ve probably developed a pretty good sense of your strengths. You know how to negotiate. You know your customers. You know how to read people. And when possible, you delegate the things you’re not particularly good at.
That’s efficient business management.
I’m not convinced it’s always good personal management.
I’ve been working on learning Italian because we will be traveling to Italy later this year. I’m certainly not going to pretend I will mastered it. Quite the opposite. There is something humbling about struggling to remember a basic word that an Italian six-year-old uses without thinking.
But that’s exactly what I like about it.
For a little while, I’m a beginner again.
There is a useful business lesson here. Being willing to be bad at something is often the price of eventually becoming good at something new.
Think about how relevant that is right now. Artificial intelligence is forcing experienced executives to learn new technology. Changing markets require new sales techniques. Social media has turned business owners into publishers. Entire industries are being reshaped by tools that didn’t exist when many of us started our careers.
The person who says, “I don’t understand this yet,” has somewhere to go.
The person who says, “That’s not how we’ve ever done it,” may not.
The Takeaway: Expertise built your business.
Don’t let expertise prevent you from becoming a beginner again.
