Three lesson entrepreneurs can learn from Frederick Douglass (Frederick Douglass) who leaders who are leading during a challenge period

this Black History MonthWe can understand how to understand how many challenges have experienced a lot of challenges. Through the dark era and achieve victory, you need bravery, endurance, guts and vision. Be Diversity, fairness and tolerance (DEI) Consultant, most of my time is helping the challenges of large and small companies. I often treat black leaders like Frederick Douglass as elasticity.

Here are three courses that all entrepreneurs can learn in professional and personal life.

Choose the path of self -development

In a period of challenging, sometimes our best teacher is ourselves. No one is better than Frederick Douglass. Despite slavery, Frederick Douglass knew that his free votes were educated. Douglass moved to Wye House plantation when he was six years old, where he was taken care of by Lucretia Auld, the wife of the recently died slave supervisor. Later, she sent him the Hugh and Sophia Auld of Baltimore. When Douglas was about 12 years old, Sophia Auld began to teach him letters. However, her husband Hugh strongly opposed it because he believed that the blindness scan encouraging slavers to seek freedom.

Douglass secretly taught himself to read and write, and once said: “Knowledge is the path from slavery to freedom.” Writing and reading from the poster on the cellar and barn gate. In his later years, he continued to write three best -selling biography: The narrative of Frederick Douglass’s life narrative Attacking Americans (1845), My restraint and freedom (1855) and The life and era of Frederick Douglass (1881).

The lesson is: When it is time to develop and change, please select Self -development Long -term growth and success. Whether you are stuck, you have to get an executive coach, to hone the fundraising skills or implement a new one DEI plan Related stakeholders are skeptical and do the difficult things you know in the future.

Related: 3 C’s Martin Luther King Jr. can teach us to improve the diversity, fairness and inclusiveness of workplace today

What is the right one-even if no one is listening

Douglass is famous for vocal music abolition. He spent two years in Ireland and the United Kingdom to eliminate lectures from slavery in the United States. Concentric Europeans donated money to buy his freedom from the Ord family. When he returned to the United States in 1847, he founded the first slaveist newspaper ActingThere he advocated to cancel slavery in writing.

This is a lesson: I said that what you know is correct. In business, we often follow our competitors, copy their work, iterate it, and try to surpass them. However, some of the best entrepreneurs I know draw their own paths, often swim in upstream, innovate all the way, and do anything that has never been done. In a period of challenging, these may be like adventure. However, these entrepreneurs focus on their vision of the future and do what they think are right, even if others have not purchased.

Related: From faith to politics: how to make difficult dialogues in the workplace

If you feel a person, please build an alliance

When you are in a challenging situation (whether you try to keep your business floating or sail in an uncertain market), you can spend the storm through establishing alliances and partnerships with people around you. Frederick Douglass did do this, but accompanied by the female election right.

In 1848, Douglass participated in the Seneca Falls Convent, which was his first women’s rights conference in New York. When other people could not see the relationship between women’s election rights and abolition of women, Douglas resolutely spoke in favor of women’s voting rights, and equated the rights of black people in the predicament of women. He often said that if women have the right to participate in political power, the world will be a better place. In this era, this partnership is revolutionary. Douglass was approved by Article 19, but his allies and advocating civil rights and freedom will never be forgotten.

The lesson is: Establish a partnership. No one can survive alone. If you have not established so many partnerships, alliances and interpersonal relationships, then it is now time. Douglass understands that he can improve his career and create collective growth by relying on a common value and target community. When the difficult business in the time, the advantage of your partnership will enable you to achieve it.

Related: This is the Black History Month. This is a way to show the black employee you care about.

Final idea

Sometimes, looking back at the past is helpful. Finding a leader like Frederick Douglass is not only an inspiring choice, but also a smart choice. He was a person who worked hard to live life in the era of slavery, and raised how he read, wrote, spoke, and eventually became the advocate of freedom and liberation. You can’t help but feel that Douglas will be a suggestion that you are still alive. He is one of the many characters in the history of black people. It can provide us with guidance when uncertainty and turbulence, and can become a model of challenges of perseverance, confidence and hope.