Best Advice: Make Your Own Mistakes

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share the best advice they've ever received. Read all the posts here.

I have to be completely honest with you. I've never been a major proponent of sharing the "best advice I've ever received," but only because I've been fortunate enough to have a variety of voices that have bestowed amazing insights and advice as I've grown in my career.

When I first started Mashable in 2005, I was a teenager living in my hometown of Aberdeen, Scotland. I didn't have in-person access to prominent figures from my rural locale, so I depended on the web to bring me closer to these great minds.

Since then, on an almost daily basis, I derived advice from the content I read, watch and consume, in general. I have become a better entrepreneur and CEO by learning from all sorts of people and their perspectives, and in some cases, people I’ve never met.

Last year, I shared how "keep listening" was the best advice I've ever received. It's still a vitally important piece of advice, and one that is built into Mashable, as a community-first organization.

But the successes we've had at Mashable over the past year, including the company's first-ever round of capital, have made me think a little deeper about what I've had the opportunity to learn over the eight years since I started Mashable.

As an entrepreneur in my early 20s, I believed in the mantra, "Don't take advice; make your own mistakes." I still believe in part of this -- guess which part?

Every single day, I take advice from my team, mainly in the form of their examples.

When you work with a talented team, taking risks and trying new things doesn't feel like "taking risks." I have learned to not only trust those who I work with to see company efforts through, but to empower them to carry these projects, learn from missteps and iterate our company each step of the way.

We are living through an exciting period of time in the media industry, where the possibilities are endless for the future of this field and our company. And with the support and guidance from the people I'm proud to work with on a daily basis, I can't wait to see what that future holds.

Photo: Pete Cashmore/Instagram