You Are Learning From the Wrong People
The three classrooms that successful people never talk about — but every serious entrepreneur needs to enter
I want to challenge something you probably believe without realising it.
You believe that the best teachers are the ones who succeeded.
So you buy their books. You watch their YouTube channels. You pay for their masterclasses. You study their morning routines and their investment strategies and the exact moment they decided to bet everything on themselves.
And there is value in that. I am not telling you to stop.
But here is what I have observed after years of working with African entrepreneurs and startup founders: the people who are growing the fastest are not just studying success. They are mining wisdom from places most people walk straight past.
Here are three of them.
1. The People Who Failed
Failed people do not host seminars.
They do not sell courses. They do not get invited onto podcasts. The world has a short memory for people who tried and did not make it, and so they quietly disappear from the conversation while the winners keep talking.
But if you will sit with someone who failed — really sit with them, buy them a meal, ask honest questions — you will get an education that no seminar can sell you.
Think about how the medical world approaches death. When a patient dies, doctors do not simply file the paperwork and move on. They conduct a postmortem. A deliberate, structured investigation into what the disease was doing inside the body. How it moved. Where it attacked first. What it destroyed on the way out. That investigation does not belong to the dead patient. It belongs to every future patient who walks in with the same condition. The postmortem saves lives that have not yet been threatened.
This is the same reason medical students spend time in the dissection room. A cadaver, studied carefully, holds secrets that protect the living.
Every failed business is a cadaver. Every entrepreneur who lost everything is a postmortem waiting to happen.
Study them. Trace the decisions. Find where the cash stopped moving. Understand when the partnership broke and why nobody said anything sooner. Map the exact moment the market gave a warning that was ignored.
That knowledge will protect you in ways that a success story never can. A winner tells you what worked for them, in their context, with their resources, at that particular time. A failure shows you the disease itself — and once you can recognise the disease, you can treat it before it kills you.
2. Your Enemies and Your Critics
Stay with me here, because this one requires something most of us were not raised to offer — genuine humility toward people we do not like.
Your enemies are studying you more carefully than your friends are.
Your friends love you. That love is real and it matters. But love softens the truth. The person who does not like you has no such obligation. They are watching you with sharp, unfiltered eyes. They see the gap between what you claim and what you deliver. They catch your inconsistencies before your customers do. They notice what is not working long before you are willing to admit it.
Now here is what I want you to sit with.
Even Jesus, in his instructions to his disciples, told them to be as wise as serpents. The serpent — across scripture and across African cultural memory — is a representation of the enemy. Yet Jesus did not say fear the serpent. He did not say ignore the serpent or simply pray against it. He said learn from it. Study its wisdom. Understand how it moves. There is something in the nature of your adversary that, properly observed, makes you sharper.
That is not compromise. That is strategy.
The mistake most entrepreneurs make is rejecting the message because they cannot stand the messenger. A competitor mocks your product publicly. A customer leaves a brutal review. A person who has never supported you points out a flaw in your business model.
And instead of pausing to ask “Is any part of this true?” — we defend ourselves. We dismiss them. We tell our friends what was said and wait for the reassurance.
That is expensive pride.
Your critic is giving you market research for free. Your enemy is showing you your blind spots at no charge. The wise thing — the serpent-wise thing — is to separate the tone from the truth, extract what is useful, and go fix the problem.
3. Children
Before the world teaches a child what is impossible, a child attempts everything.
Watch a child learning to walk. They fall down dozens, sometimes hundreds of times. And they do not once sit on the floor and conclude that walking is simply not for them. They get up. They adjust the angle. They grab a table edge, a trouser leg, a wall. They are not brave in any conscious sense — they simply have not yet been told that falling is something to be ashamed of.
That is the exact mindset that builds businesses on this continent.
Children also ask the questions that adults are too embarrassed to raise. Why does this cost so much? Why do you do it that way and not another way? What happens if you try this instead? Adults have been socialised into a performance of understanding. We nod in meetings. We follow the industry template because questioning it would make us look naive. We accept the way things have always been done because somewhere along the line we stopped believing our questions were worth asking.
Meanwhile, the child — or the entrepreneur who has kept the child’s instinct alive — asks the one disruptive question that restructures the entire model.
Some of the most quietly successful founders I have encountered on this continent were not the most credentialed people in the room. They were the ones who never stopped asking why. Who refused to accept that a previous failure was a permanent verdict. Who looked at an industry everyone else had accepted and said — sincerely, almost innocently — but what if we did it differently?
That is child-thinking. And it is rarer than an MBA.
The Classrooms Nobody Talks About
Failure. Criticism. Childhood.
Three uncomfortable teachers. Three sources of wisdom that do not come with certificates or stages or applause.
The reason most people avoid them is the same reason they are so valuable — they require you to sit with something that does not feel good. To learn from a life that did not work out. To listen to a voice that does not wish you well. To think in a way that the world long ago told you to grow out of.
But the entrepreneur who is serious about building something real on African soil cannot afford to only learn from comfort.
Go study the wreckage. Listen to the people who are not clapping for you. And every now and then, think like someone who has not yet been told it cannot be done.
Those three classrooms will teach you what the seminars never will.
If this challenged you, share it with one entrepreneur who needs to read it today. And if you are not yet subscribed, join the community at Big Money Mindset — where we have the honest conversations about building wealth in Africa.