A business school teaches you many critical skills: broader worldview, strategic thinking, better time management, self-discipline, problem-solving, amongst many others. It trains you to understand theories and models and how to apply them to real-life problems. But no matter how expansive your curriculum, it does not teach you much about entrepreneurial success. When it comes to entrepreneurship, it is better learned than taught. Perhaps this is why we have self-made billionaires who dropped out of college.

While we all learn our own lessons through our own experiences, here are 5 important lessons that no business school will teach you.

1.      How to be a leader

Having an impressive degree will help you solve problems through better frameworks. The course can offer you specialized training in different functions of a business. But what that degree will not teach you is how to lead a team of people from the front. Being responsive, reliable, charismatic and taking responsibility are all essential qualities that make a good leader. And these qualities are developed when you are running your own business.

2.      How to be resilient

Being an entrepreneur is one of the hardest challenges that one takes up. Believing in your idea when no one else does and to keep putting one step in front of another without much success requires resilience. Of course, there are days that are rewarding but most of the journey is long and alone and all most entrepreneurs have is undying faith in their ideas.

3.      How to build the right team

Hiring the right talent is one of the most challenging tasks. From attracting and engaging the right individuals to creating an overall efficient recruitment process requires multiple trials and errors. There is no ready-made formula that a business school can teach you when it comes to building your team. It is only you who can, over the course of time, decide who are the right candidates who will add value to your business and remain loyal for the long haul.

4.      How to be prepared for plans to fail

As an entrepreneur, you need to be prepared to be unprepared. You can create multiple spreadsheets, have a detailed step-by-step process, but chances are strong that in the moment of action you are going to operate on a more reactive basis instead of proactive. New prospects and changing situations will always require you to act at the moment. However, it still helps to have a plan in place so that you have some direction in your mind.

5.      How to communicate correctly

As an entrepreneur, you are going to communicate with people in the real and the virtual world. And in both these scenarios first impressions matter. When it comes to real life conversations, how you present yourself, your demeanor and passion with which you speak will be contagious.

In the virtual world, your first impression will be your domain name—the piece of communication that will lead people to your website. Here you can have something as vague as www.mysuperlongbusinessname.com or something as smart as www.mybusiness.site (these are just examples of URLs for you to consider).

Your domain name is one of those seeds that, if you plant it right, will bear fruits for as long as your business exists. A domain name on a new domain extension such as .TECH, .ONLINE, .SPACE, .STORE, etc tells people how forward-thinking you are and gives your business a great branding advantage.

6.      How to keep adapting to changing times

Here, let’s take Elon Musk’s example who after co-founding PayPal, transitioned into a completely offbeat field and found Tesla and SolarCity. If you want to continue progressing, you will have to learn to adapt and reposition yourself into unacquainted turfs from time to time.

Conclusion

Being an entrepreneur may be challenging, but it is a deeply rewarding journey. These are some of the many lessons that old and new entrepreneurs keep learning and re-learning. Business school might teach you the basic skills, most of which you will have to unlearn if you want to be an entrepreneur. When it comes to entrepreneurship only life experiences will teach you how to do something “right”.

Post by Alisha Shibli

Alisha is a Content Marketing Specialist at Radix, the registry behind some of the most successful new domain extensions, including .STORE and .TECH. You can connect with her on LinkedIn. For more information about the new domain name extensions like .press, .site, .store, .tech, .online, .space, .fun, and .website, visit https://radix.website/