Learning from people

Couple of weeks ago we made an interview for AIESEC E-book project, where famous and successful Estonian entrepreneurs share their stories. It’s published and distributed in autumn as an CD to inspire and educate young people to become entrepreneurs or just to get new ideas for their own future.

Our interviewee Andres Koger is the top executive of one of the biggest construction companies in Estonia. The area his working in is masculine – construction. He has been in this business over 20 years, gone through some really tough times, started from a scratch with no-one believing he could succeed and built despite of the tough competition and lack of support in the beginning a profitable and strong company.

What would you expect a person with such background would stress? Hard work, determination, setting high goals, being better than your competitor? Where have his experiences taken him?

Seems so that there is something connecting successful people, at least according to my experiences – they all care about some spiritual values that matter more than material ones. He even told: “Setting money as your goal is a formula of failure,” which was based on his own experience when he went down with his business.

It was assuring to hear him talking about some really simple and humanistic values – sincerity, honesty, passion for your work, caring about people, family.

Some lessons he shared and that stayed in my mind:

Everyone wants to be loved.

Good leader is sincere, honest and opened and knows thoroughly his/her field of work.

To get you have to give, the more you give the more you get.

Searching for balance is the meaning of life.

To love means taking risks. You have to open yourself – both for love and both for getting hurt.

He told us that people tend to surround themselves with thick walls to protect themselves from getting hurt. But the weird paradox here is that the thicker the wall, the stronger the attacks. So the more you try to protect yourself from the cruel world, the crueler it gets and you have the impression that world is full of tensions and all bad things happen to you. So you get even more closed and stony, moving away from your personal happiness.

So how weird it might sound – giving to others only serves your own interests. You can be happy only if you give away, not keep for yourself.

The other thing that related with my personal experiences and redefined them in somewhat new way was this: children are sent to you to teach you.

He has five children and all of them are different. His wife has asked: “How come they are all so different? I have raised all of them the same way!” He believes the child is sent to you for a certain lessons, the right child for the right moment for the right person. And if someone doesn’t get any children – it’s again the way it was supposed to be.

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Talking to people is a great source of learning for me, especially when people have something to say. I will most probably always stay a student, because the more I learn the more I realize how little I know and especially how far is my theory from practice. Older generation doesn’t give me much hope either – the brighter ones of them say they are learning themselves as well. As Andres Koger put it: “I’m still a student myself.”