Personal Decline and Self Deterioration

I’m Your Business Advisor and I’ve Got No Idea What I’m Talking About!

Business advice for idiots

I went to a start your own business seminar a few months back, and thought I would leave looking like the guys in the picture above.

Instead, I felt like this

I’ve always been amazed at how the stupid get good jobs. It must be a skill, and I’m perpetually envious of folk who are able to earn good money with no experience of anything.

The business seminar was a case in point.

The young business trainer that day, a chap called Fabrice, was tasked with mentoring six individuals. I don’t use the word mentoring lightly here. I see it as a difficult complex job that takes years of experience to master. Only then should you call yourself a mentor.

Unfortunately these days, the word mentoring is used as often as decaf coffee. Or Tim Denning.

Fabrice was not a mentor in any shape or form. I’ve met better mentors asking for change on the sidewalk. The poor guys who have Scotch tape as shoes and wear bin liners as jackets. Yet who have more mentoring potential than this guy. Who let's face it, couldn’t even make a (decaf) coffee. Let alone run a business.

Because guess what?

He never has. Has never been inside a warehouse, a factory, or a busy office. Never even photocopied his genitals and sent them to his boss.

Fabrice left school and went straight into a training program with a government employment agency where he spent ‘five glorious years’ getting absorbed into the system like a sponge soaks up glue.

I know all of this, because he told us. This was his first mistake.

Someone with half a brain would have kept his relative inexperience to himself. Instead, he freely admitted that he had done plenty of exams, but had never sat in front of a bank manager begging for a loan to save his life.

To say Fabrice was naïve was the understatement of the century. He’d left himself so open to ridicule that a firing squad wouldn’t have missed his stupidity from 8 miles away.

‘So if you have never run a business,’ asked one of the angrier guys at the seminar. ‘Why the fuck are you here?’

The guy was pissed off and rightly so. Here he was hoping for some advice from an expert. Instead, he got a kid with a clipboard.

This isn’t the first time I’ve wasted my time at a training seminar. I remember attending a course on workplace motivation when I was working for a marketing company called Eager-Beaver.

For a whole day, we had to play team-building games to improve ‘morale and cohesion’. It was the usual bullshit like building a life-size replica of the Eiffel Tower from four pencils and a rubber band.

Another, called The Human Knot, consisted of standing in an inward facing circle and holding hands with someone opposite you. The team then had to unravel themselves without unlinking hands so that we ended up back in a perfect circle.

There seemed little point to it, except to give ample chance for a few of the guys to rub up the girls.

‘Sorry, is that your breast I’m rubbing my crotch against.’

In another game we had to pass a small plastic ring down a line using a straw dangling from our mouths. Nice…

At lunch that day, a gruff copy editor called Dave Joy, who’d been with the company 20 years, asked a very simple question to one of the trainers.

‘Why are we doing this?’

The trainer’s face — a guy called Zak — went the colour of the vanilla blancmange he was eating. Clearly, no one had ever asked him this question before. Or if they had, never in such a deadpan and serious tone.

Zak smiled a few times, had a swig of his Powerade, stabbed his blancmange like it was alive, and then regurgitated a training manual:

‘To develop leadership, problem-solving and cooperation…’

‘What did you do before this?’ Dave cut him off.

‘Er,’ said Zak. ‘This is my first job.’

Dave smiled to himself, went outside for a cigarette, and never came back.

Actions always speak louder than words or stupid games. And I hope Zak took heed of Dave’s silent advice that day, which was:

Don’t waste your life doing a job you know nothing about.

Thanks for reading. For more self-help, check out