Spend some time each day teaching someone something you have learned in your life. I teach business management to young people.
Why is it important to teach others?
If you have been learning something, there is no better way to cement your knowledge than to teach it to others. It is fine, if you do not really know it that well — as long as you are honest about that when you are teaching it to someone.
For example, you can be a beginner at chess, but you will learn something about it and you can teach it to your kids. They know that you are not a tournament contender, let alone a master, and yet you are still teaching them something they do not know.
And when you do, you will begin to really understand it. Because to teach you have to take what you have absorbed, reflect upon it, find a way to organize it so that you can communicate the concepts clearly enough for someone else to understand it, see their mistakes and help correct them, see where the holes in your knowledge are, and more.
You also help someone with something they want to learn, and in doing so, make their life better. Nothing feels better than this, and it gives your life a great purpose.
Why I teach business management?
For over 10 years, I have been involved in business education which helped me to find the connection between business and human life. I also love reading about the business world in my free time.
I went to college to study business administration and management. Then, I attended the graduate school to study global business journalism and conducted academic research in business communications.
After joining the job market, I had started delivering corporate communication courses to employees and managers from various industries. Later, I joined one of the international schools and got involved in international business education. At the same time, I have been doing more research on learning and teaching business in the global context.
Currently, my focus is on teaching theoretical aspects of running a business entity — making sound business decisions that help companies to become successful in generating returns for various interest groups such as owners, investors, workers or local communities over a long period of time. From time to time, I also do business consulting and provide other business-related services.
But, the most interesting fact is that throughout my over-a-decade-long career of studying, researching and teaching business management, I have discovered that there are tons of similarities between a company and human life. The more business books and business media articles I read, the more persuaded I was that there is a strong link between making good business decisions that results in building a successful business organization and making good life decisions that results in living a successful life.
In fact, what people do on daily basis sounds very alike with what companies do every day. Let’s take a look at a few quick examples.
- Business organizations increase profits while we increase our savings by earning more and spending less.
- Companies choose the best suppliers while we buy the freshest fruits and vegetables picking them carefully in shops.
- Businesses choose environmentally friendly technologies while we try to buy products which are made of recycled materials to reduce pollution.
- Businesses train workforce while we spend fortunes to send our children to good schools and extracurricular activities.
All this sounds similar, huh?
How I teach business management?
My daily work evolves around teaching business at the international school where I work full-time, and publishing articles about business management and life management on the Internet in my free time. I run this website providing you with two things that are in very high demand these days:
- Better managed businesses.
- Higher quality of life.
My business activity allows me to offer services to all of you. I think I am pretty good at business writing. I have decent business management knowledge and skills too — I skillfully apply those into my own life to manage it better. In addition, I developed learning and teaching skills that helped to dramatically improve my quality of life. On the engineering side, I self-taught myself how to code and design beautiful websites.
Typically, my readers include business owners and managers of other businesses who use business tools, theories and techniques to make better business decisions to make companies perform better. Another group of users include individual people like you and me who want to improve our lives.
Therefore, through this Internet project I aim to create value and add value by giving people from around the world easy access to business education. I also popularize business content and concepts alongside developing this project, so we can develop our business organizations as we go.
How to teach others?
- Reflect on things you have been learning as you make these changes. If you have meditated, started eating healthier, learned to be more present, started doing work you love, etc. These are amazing things that other people want to learn.
- Think about others who might want to learn about what you have been learning. Other people might have similar goals, and would really appreciate your help. Keep your eyes open — you might find people who are open to learning with and from you.
- The teacher’s job, really, is to fascinate the student. Fascination is the key to learning. Then help the student put the fascination into action. As a teacher, you should fascinate the student by rediscovering with him or her all the things that originally fascinated you about the topic. If you cannot get fascinated, you will not care enough to really learn something. You will just go through the motions. How do you get fascinated? Often doing something with or for other people helps to motivate me to look more deeply into something, and reading about other business owners and managers who have been successful or legendary at it also fascinates me.
- Find a way to be hands-on and do the activity with them. I like to do Balance Sheets with my students and other people to show them how fun it can be to manage your own wealth. After they calculate their Assets and Liabilities to come up with Equity, their Net Worth or real wealth, this activity turns out to be really powerful.
- Play. Learning is not work. It is fun. If you are learning because you think you should, not because you are having fun with it, you will not really stick with it for long, or you will hate it and not care about it. So, make it play. Make games out of it, e.g. you can play Monopoly, Football Manager or other business simulations. Sing and dance while you do it. Show off your new skills to people, with a smile on your face.
- Show them how to learn more on their own. Give them books such as Peter Drucker’s books on Management or Seth Godin’s books on marketing, websites such as Bloomberg, CNBC or Yahoo Finance, and a method for learning such as constructing business tools like The SWOT Analysis or The STEEPLE Analysis. But offer to answer questions they might have as they learn.
