What College Forgot to Teach You About Running Your Own Business

To many people, running your own business is the best course of action if you want to be wealthy and in control of your own future. As such, many teens and young adults will study courses that teach them how to operate a company, how to start a business and how to be a successful startup. Sadly, there are many skills that even some of the most comprehensive courses won’t teach you.

Part of the reason is that the business landscape is constantly changing. What you studied in college might not apply anymore because of the time it took from you starting your course to finishing it. Another reason might be because a lot of experience in business is obtained from failure and not success. If you don’t experience a crushing defeat at least once in your career, then can you really save you’ve learnt anything?

In this article, we’ll be going through some of the most important points to understand as a budding entrepreneur that college never taught you.

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Understanding Your Failures

Many colleges will fail to teach you about humility. They paint a picture that once you’re in, you’re in and that you have no chance of failing. They get you into this mentality that everyone can be successful in life and that there’s absolutely no chance that you can fail because you’ve studied this all-important course.

That’s all a lie.

No matter how much you paid for your college course or how hard you studied, if you aren’t able to embrace your failures then you will make virtually no progress in your own business. You need to have a more humble approach to your company and to account for every potential failure if you want to have a shot at making it big.

However, what’s even more important than learning about your failures is what you do afterwards. Whether it’s pulling out of a deal or apologizing to an employee, some business owners simply have too much pride and won’t be willing to take the obvious yet slightly embarrassing route to fix their problems. For example, they might neglect to look at their net working capital equation and, as a result, end up losing more money than they make. They might need to take a small business loan just to stay afloat, but their pride might prevent them from seeing the obvious problem; their business just isn’t profitable and something needs to be done.


Trying to be perfect in business is impossible. No business is perfect and even the larger companies out there do not strive for it. Throw the idea of a perfect untouchable business out of the window. Until you can run a stable startup and grow it, trying to be a perfect business is out of your league.

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Some Final Words

These are just a few points to keep in mind when running a business. While a business college is capable of teaching you the basics, there are far too many lessons to learn and it’s important that you are open to changes in the business landscape in order to be successful.

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By Iconic Chica Mag Contributors