What do most people misunderstand about the learning process? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Adam Lupu, VP of learning at Andela, on Quora:

In my experience the most commonly held initial beliefs about how learning works go something like this...

The novice learner's perspective: I am really interested in X, I really enjoy learning more about X, this must be the way to learn everything! Let me try applying this method to Y...

When learners become teachers, mentors, or supervisors, the above beliefs often turn into...

The novice teacher's perspective: I am really confident about how much I know about X, I learned it the hard way, so now let me tell you all the things you need to know and do to learn it like I did.

Unfortunately, while these perspectives appear to be fairly common, they are also fairly limiting. They survive and thrive on confirmation bias. If you have a love for a particular topic or task, you'll work hard on that task, and you'll enjoy it. You will put more attention on it, you'll engage both the emotional reward centers and logical processing centers of your brain and effectively you'll anchor to a process as being the key to your learning when it was actually the specific topic, task, or teacher that really got you excited.

There's also the personalized learning fallacy.This is when someone believes something like "everyone learns differently" which leads to them becoming distracted by theories like learning styles and multiple intelligences. So rather than focusing on the ways in which they and everyone around them can share a common learning experience that will have universal value for the entire community of learners, they focus instead on differentiating themselves (or their students) from others. As far as I know, that differentiation has shown to be less valuable than universally applicable research-backed practices like formative feedback, guided reflection, and access to supportive peers, mentors, role models, and mental models.

Therefore, to avoid the novice learner's belief ("I learned X, so I can only learn things like X or using a technique like I used for X.") and the personalized learning fallacy ("everyone learns differently"), I recommend the following more nuanced, but super-empowering perspective.

The experienced learning scientist's perspective:Everyone can leverage a few basic techniques to learn just about anything. The timeline for me to learn X may be extended by my lack of experience in topics related to X. So in an effort to accelerate that timeline, can I leverage my experience in topics related to Y, analogizing those relationships to X? Let's find a community of practitioners and some engaging resources online and find out!

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Most people assume that if you're an entrepreneur, you are inherently CEO material. And if you're a CEO, you are, by definition, an entrepreneur. 

I disagree. 

I have personally started five businesses from the ground-up. This is what makes me an entrepreneur. But as these companies have grown in size, and more parties have become involved, I have inherently had to move more into the role of CEO.

Let me tell you, being an effective CEO and entrepreneur are two very different skill sets.

What's an entrepreneur?

As entrepreneurs, we're people who wake up every day willing to risk it all. While others are thinking about how to handle today, we're thinking about where their industry is headed--and how we can double-down now to put ourselves in a position of leverage later.

We're people who can both operate on the ground-level, who have the expertise to dig into the work if and when it's needed, but also have the awareness to see the company from a 30,000 foot perspective.

What gets my juices going isn't running a successful company. As an entrepreneur, my excitement comes from putting the right people around me to execute so that I can start thinking about the next industry, market, or opportunity.

Which is very different from what makes for a great CEO.

What's a CEO?

There is a big misconception going on in the entrepreneurship community about what a CEO actually is.

It seems like anyone with a website and an LLC can call themselves a CEO today. Young entrepreneurs "start a company" and then run around calling themselves the CEO--or worse, waste time debating with their co-founder (who is their childhood friend) who should be the CEO and who should be the CFO. 

Formally speaking, you're closer to an entrepreneur than you are a CEO, in this case.

But the real difference between a CEO and an entrepreneur is that while a CEO has to be aware of the future, their real "job" is to manage the now. They're in the position they're in to evaluate what's happening in their market today, not to spend hours thinking about what could potentially happy down the road.

The primary difference

I was speaking recently with Megan Holsinger, director of client success at the Predictive Index and an insightful executive with 15 years of experience in human capital management and consulting. Predictive Index helps companies hire the best and keep them engaged with scientifically validated workforce assessment software and management workshops. They help us here at my company, LendingOne, with our hiring needs.

Holsinger pointed out that the primary difference between a CEO and an entrepreneur comes down to style. "It's not just a title. It's an approach to the work," she said. "And what it really comes down to is risk. The style of many CEOs is to be risk averse, whereas entrepreneurs and founders tend to be more willing to embrace risk."

As someone who has played both roles, I see the differences between CEOs and entrepreneurs every day. When you're first starting out building your company, you're an entrepreneur. You're in startup mode, constantly thinking about how to shake up your industry and do something different.

But at a certain point (and I've experienced this countless times), assuming all goes well and your company has grown in size, you have to start thinking like a CEO. 

Instead of thinking about how to grow and expand into new markets, you're thinking about how to improve upon what you've already built. You have to adopt a broader perspective, because you're now accountable to a board, or investors, as well as your much larger roster of employees. As a CEO, you have budgets to work within, metrics to hit, and stakeholders to answer to--which means you have to operate with a more formal style, and risk must be more heavily measured.

I've played the role of CEO for much of my career, but it's the moments I get to be an entrepreneur that really gets my juices flowing. And I am happiest when I can run a large company but still instill the entrepreneurial spirit throughout the organization.

Still, it's important to remember that one is not necessarily better or worse than the other. It's merely a difference in style.

A few weeks ago I received an email about a new beauty product launch, a cosmetics brand called, Lawless. Being relatively new to the industry myself, I have become acutely aware of new cosmetics & hair launches (Cosmoprof North America is my happy place) so when I found out Lawless was all natural and started by an entrepreneur whose business I was already familiar with, Suja Juice, the largest organic juice company in the US, I was immediately interested in the story.

I sat down with Annie Lawless, Chairman & CEO of Lawless, to talk about her transition from her first company, the beverage empire (now partially owned by Coca-Cola) Suja Juice, to cosmetics.

Diving in deeper, and after meeting Annie it became pretty clear: She's a huge makeup lover, personally. The most successful businesses are born out of personal necessity, so it comes as no surprise that both of her businesses started that way. According to Annie, she was simply making juices for herself before Suja -- and this was no different. 

Aside from being a business powerhouse, Annie has also amassed quite an impressive social following of (mostly) women who follow her personal tips on food, fashion, travel and beauty, so for Annie, it made sense to offer her followers, and women everywhere, something more than your average makeup.

In an age where marketers depend on influencers with followings like Annie's, she had a perfect storm and a unique perspective on launching a beauty brand.

Talking to Annie more and more, it made perfect sense why someone who was so interested in health would go into cosmetics immediately following an amazing exit. Your skin is the largest organ in your body, and 64% of the chemicals in makeup are absorbed from your skin¹. Not too much different than juicing if you think about it.

Here are 3 takeaways from Annie's adventure in serial entrepreneurship anyone can learn from:

1. The best brands come from personal necessity

Annie started Suja Juice because she struggled with Celiac Disease, and started Lawless because she wanted a natural makeup that was equal parts high quality and beautiful. I have no doubt Lawless will be as successful.

2. There is always room in the market for a strong brand

Natural cosmetics on the market tend to look "granola" and do not come off as sexy as some of the bigger names out there. Annie's branding, imagery, product packaging and design are perfection and really offer strong customer touch-points at every stage. Never back down from competition, no matter how large of a scale you are up against.

3. A great brand with a poor product will never be successful at scale

Paying attention to brand is extremely important, but the physical product and customer touch-points share an equal role in creating a successful company. 

1 Brown et al. The role of skin absorption as a route of exposure for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in drinking water. Am J Public Health. 1984 May; 74(5): 479-484

Every entrepreneur looks to emulate their business heroes throughout their own journey.  The wealthy, famous and successful are often asked how they would do it, if they had to do it all over again. This question is almost always asked at the peak of their journey, reflecting after a long career of wins. And their answers are often taken as golden advice. But there's a problem, the logic is often flawed.

Asking successful people what they'd do differently, isn't the same as asking them for tactical decisions of their past. It's asking them to share new, and improved yet unproven ideas. Many an entrepreneur confuse one for the other.We often fail to recognize that past success in one area does not guarantee future success in another.

Knowing the specific decisions and actions that brought success to others can help you on your journey. This is true without a doubt. But knowing how they would approach the same challenge with different circumstances, or even a new challenge is a different ball of wax altogether. And the answers are not nearly as valuable because the likelihood of successful application is decreased.

Those who made it big, spend time reflecting on their past and pontificating on prescriptions for others. This often results in new ideas based on unproven theories that assume different conditions.

There is no escaping the revisionist bias either. The reflective advice from the successful is often filled with rose-colored idealism.  Wealth, regret and lessons learned often motivate us to change the story. Those lessons learned inspire new ideas, that are often widely espoused before being thoroughly tested.

A good way to explain this is to think of Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. In the story, a crude, mean man, amasses tons of wealth, reflects upon his life in old age and realizes he focused on the wrong things in life. After a series of spiritual interventions, he becomes generous and espouses goodwill towards his fellow man. The shift in both attitude and tact, is remarkably easier to do, when your own basic, material needs are met. The dirty truth of it is the flawed, dysfunctional and even toxic attitudes and actions helped bring the original success. By attempting to deny or cut out the upsides that came from these attitudes, we start working with different equations.

Our desire to redeem ourselves is so strong. Mistakes large and small are guaranteed on the entrepreneurial path. We often unconsciously project our baggage and embed corrective action into our advice to others. While we may find it comforting, we usually don't know for sure that the changes would produce better results. And Elon Musk and Bill Gates are no less human.

So, if you're trying to hustle from A to B, and you run into Bill Gates or Elon Musk on an elevator, don't ask them what they'd do differently. Ask them to share specifics from their playbook. Try to learn an emulate their process. Details from the proven playbook of the successful are more valuable than their best guesses for new challenges.