Mr. Trump You Are Wrong!

Mr. Trump; You Are Wrong

Mr. Donald Trump is no doubt a great man. You can probably call him the most loved billionaire in the USA [and indeed the world]. I am really shocked when I watch his reality TV show ‘the Apprentice’ and find young entrepreneurs with businesses worth hundreds of millions take 14 weeks off their business to seek an opportunity to work with Mr. Trump as apprentice for one year. Others who are top executive on their jobs have to turn in their resignation to compete for a chance to be apprenticed to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump is loved because of his story. Here is a man who created a successful business in real estate at a very young age and then due to a crisis in the economy he came crumbling down with a debt of over a billion dollars. Rather than weep and moan, Mr. Trump sat down and worked himself right out of debt and right back to the top. He paid his billion dollar debt and became a billionaire once again. What a great man indeed.

Mr. Trump wrote of his experience in his book ‘The Art Of The Deal’. In it he stated the secret to his great comeback story was his ability to negotiate and that is what he calls the art of the deal. But then he dropped the bombshell when he said the ability to be a great negotiator is something you are born with and not something that anyone can acquired, so you are either born a negotiator of you are not.

Well this is the point where Mr. Trump and I start to diverge. Mr. Trump no offence but I beg to disagree. Here is what I believe: some people might be born with a personality and disposition that makes it easy for them to be great negotiators but it doesn’t mean that anybody cannot become great negotiator, and that is because God has given us all a special ability called learning.

I can become anything I want to be if I will choose to learn it. The ability to learn is the greatest ability you possess. I believe we were not born with anything but we become who we are through the things that we learnt, and by the way what do you know today that was not learned. You guessed it – nothing! From walking, to eating, talking, reading …to even the art of learning itself, we acquired it all through the process of learning.

The thing about learning is that it is in doing. Learning is an action word. There are quite a number of routes to learning, you can read, you can probe, you can ask questions, you can observe but the best form of learning is in doing. Action! There are certain things you can’t learn any other way except by doing. You can read all you want about driving but you don’t learn to drive till you drive. You can give a child a one hundred hour lecture on the importance of walking and how to walk, but until that child gets up and starts attempting to walk, he will never learn to walk. Same way you learnt most of the important things in life.

The more I do the better I become. Action is key here but Action without value is worthless activity. It is also important to say that the ultimate end of learning is productivity, not just activity. If learning is an action word, then it is important to note that in the process of learning-doing, you have to sometimes risk making mistakes. But even when it appears that you failed at something, anyone may choose to laugh at it thinking it’s because you don’t know. Well, yes they might be right but more importantly is the fact that for you it is just another phase in the process of your becoming a master at it - You are simply learning. And the better you learn the better you become. Put differently; the more you do or act, the better you become.

So by all means get into action. Get active, but bear in mind that your activity is to result in learning, the end product of which is that you become more productive through the process of learning. The proof of learning is in your productivity. Don’t just be active, make sure to be productive.

A version of this article was first written for the publication moregazine October 2012