You don’t want to be an Einstein in business.
The one thing that is constant in business is change. As a result, many successful entrepreneurs run into business and financial trouble as their career goes on, because they ignore changes in the business and industry. Most successful entrepreneurs will reach a point where their business stops growing and it’s generally due to the fact that they “know everything” in their industry already.
Albert Einstein is considered one of the smartest people in modern times, but his career followed the same path as the average successful entrepreneur. When he was young, he was able to formulate new ideas based on new and old information in physics. This led to the “theory of relativity” and a few years later a Nobel Prize. About the time Einstein received the Nobel Prize, Edwin Hubble (like the telescope) discovered that the universe was expanding. Despite direct empirical evidence, Einstein hung on to a “static universe” model and as a result struggled to explain Hubble’s observations and failed to advance man’s or his own understanding of physics.
To continue to succeed and grow a business, an entrepreneur needs to be a life-long student of his business and market. As new information and opportunities are presented, he needs to learn about them and incorporate them into his business. It is this ability to see things for the first time that makes most entrepreneurs successful in the first place. Too often as an advisor, my greatest challenge is not to explain options or opportunities, but to find an entrepreneur with an open mind that will receive the message. Continued success in business has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with an open mind.