Any business must, first and foremost, serve a need. There are plenty of needs out there, each representing a person in need. There are just as many clichés as how to best serve a need. Give a man a fish or teach him to fish. Common wisdom tells us that teaching a man to fish is greater both morally and practically to simply giving the man a fish—but the results are pretty much the same if your lesson of how to fish always requires you to describe and judge precisely how to bait the hook, cast the line, and retrieve the catch for every stream, lake, or river that your student in need may encounter. At some point, the judgment has to be independent and the knowledge imparted must serve merely as a foundation, or you have equally deprived a man of true livelihood.

There are many sources of wisdom all around us, in books, coaches, commentators, advisors, gurus, personalities, and speakers. If you’re not partaking of at least some of the expansive resources available in this regard, you are shortchanging your own success and ability. Learning from mistakes is wise; letting those mistakes always be your own is inefficient. Wisdom comes from experience, with the unwritten caveat being that most of this experience is negative. It requires thought. We can add these thoughts to our own collected experience and become wiser, faster. Or, if the information is presented or interpreted as all-inclusive, a set of immutable rules, then thinking stops. Without thought, there is no wisdom. What is left is a religion, but without the advantage of knowing the god to whom you are praying.

There is always room for reason and faith, but one without the other becomes a very shallow pool in which to navigate your vessel of truth. I become uncomfortable quickly with people who claim they can show you a foolproof way to success in anything simply by methodically and unquestioningly following their “proven” formula. I also become uncomfortable quickly with people who take useful and helpful knowledge and bastardize it into an excuse for not doing their own thinking, quoting snippets and clichés as if they came carved on stone tablets. Human wisdom and thought is foundational—it is most useful when shared and then built upon and ultimately shared anew. It is a dynamic process, not a static continuum.

I’m an admirer of Dave Ramsey, but I don’t agree that every good business idea can be cash-flowed with zero debt on a shoestring budget. I’ve been reading his friend Dan Miller’s books and writings on employment and self-employment for over six years, and have found out that “48 Days” isn’t a number that applies to many situations, and you’ll be pretty successful and ahead of the curve if you manage to apply the knowledge and get results in 96. Yes, I know about Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” but I don’t think I’m doomed to mediocrity if I only master five or six… or even happen to discover an eighth! I also remind myself that Donald Trump couldn’t teach me anything about how to negotiate yourself out of failure if he hadn’t actually failed… a LOT. Sun Tzu was pretty smart, too, but I wouldn’t raise him from the dead to lead a mechanized artillery division or sit in the command chair on the bridge of a fleet flagship. None of their wisdom would be worth beans if they hadn’t been wrong before, so neither should you depend that they never will be wrong again.

In every instance, the knowledge is useful and it matters, if YOU apply it properly and use critical reasoning as equally as you must also put faith into someone you don’t know. Real teachers will expect that, as false prophets will not. Run to the former, and away from the latter.

Jared A. Chambers