Wisdom comes often from listening!

Learn from others' mistakes rather than making them all yourself.

Biblical text: The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice. (Proverbs 12:15 NIV).

In his autobiography, Lee Iacocca gives others an opportunity to learn from a mistake he once made. In 1956, Ford emphasised auto safety rather than performance and horsepower. The company introduced crash padding for dashboards and sent out a film to explain how much safer the new dashboards were. The narrator on the film claimed the padding was so thick a person could drop an egg on it from a two storey building and it would bounce right off without breaking. As a district assistant sales manager for Ford, Iacocca decided he'd demonstrate this fact!

With 1,100 salesmen watching him, he climbed a high ladder and proceeded to drop an egg on a strip of the dash padding he had placed on the floor of the stage. The egg missed the padding and splattered on the floor. A second egg bounced off his assistant's shoulder. Eggs three and four landed on target, but broke on impact. Finally, with the fifth egg, he got the desired result. Iacocca writes, "I learned two lessons that day. First, never use eggs at a sales rally. And second, never go before our customers without rehearsing what you want to say - as well as what you're going to do - to help sell your product."

Good advice!