Future-Proofing Your Business: Real-Life Strategies to Prepare Your Business for Tomorrow, Today

Chapter 1. The Lesson of Learning

"I used to think that in order to look like a successful businessperson you needed to sound like one. Now I know that in order to sound like one you need to first be one. And there is only one way to do that: Be open and show the humility to learn from any source you can."

I started in business completely by accident. It was late 1989, and I was driving in to work at the radio station for another early start to another 16-hour day.

My life was starting to feel like the movie Groundhog Day; 5 a.m. start, produce the breakfast show, produce and prerecord the morning team's comedy segments for the next day's show when they came off air at 9 a.m. until about 11 a.m., go to station meetings until midafternoon, inhale some food at my studio's mixing console, pour more coffee down my throat in preparation for the second half of the day, stay locked in the darkness of the studio for another 10 hours before driving home sometime before midnight only to skull as many beers as I could in an hour before passing out on the couch, wake up at 2 a.m. with a headache, a kink in my neck, and a dead arm and decide to go to bed—and then get up two hours later to do it all again. (Isn't the media a sexy industry?)

This had been my day for three months straight. As I drove in that morning in darkness and silence, only one sentence slipped out of my mouth into the cool air: "This just isn't fun anymore." I was not growing anymore; I was not going anywhere. There didn't seem ...