Do you know how Sam Walton built his business empire?
He did it by asking the right people the right questions.
Before building Walmart, Sam would literally travel from retail store to retail store across America…
Yellow legal pad in hand, asking the best store managers dozens of questions about why they did what they did:
“Why did you stock this product and not that one?”
“Why are you displaying this over here and that over there?”
“Why is this priced like that?”
The value in doing something like this, of course, should be obvious:
He was shaving years of time off his learning curve.
He was distilling the best strategies from those at the top of his industry.
He was learning from others’ mistakes rather than fumbling through his own.
He was gathering real-world analytics and data before software made it effortless.
Asking the right people the right questions is the closest thing we have to time travel, to living others’ experiences vicariously.
Yet hardly anyone bothers to do it anymore.
As a result, I’ve found people are more willing than ever to share years of insight with me, oftentimes for the price of a decent meal, or for absolutely free.
These people, who are decades ahead of me, have been DELIGHTED to answer my questions.
So take a page out of Sam Walton’s legal pad: mentoring and learning don’t have to be expensive. And they can look however you want them to.
There is someone out there who can shave 3-10 years off your learning curve, and would be happy to do so for free, for a good meal or coffee, or for $100 or less.
So cultivate relentless curiosity, and ask the right people the right questions.