How Do You Keep Learning When You're the Boss? It's be helpful to create an unofficial "board" of advisors who you can consult with, and feel less alone.

Q: Since entrepreneurs are their own bosses, they don't report to anyone with more experience. What's the best way to continue learning and growing? — Elizabeth, Fort Lauderdale, FL

Being an entrepreneur is one of the best jobs imaginable.

It also happens to be one of the scariest, and loneliest. You're always on call, it can take years to build a semblance of success, and (statistically speaking) the odds are against you. All that is amplified by the fact that you're often making decisions on your own — so it's tough to be sure you're on the right path.

So who can entrepreneurs learn from, and lean on?

This might be counterintuitive, but I'd suggest adopting the mindset that you're not on your own. Act as if you're actually running a much bigger business, in which the expectation would be to get feedback from a collective of other leaders. One way I've found to start thinking this way is to create your own personal board of directors.

Related: 7 Tips for Making Quality Business Decisions

Your board doesn't have to be anything formal. In fact, your "members" don't even need to know they're on your board. All you need to do is select three to five people with different areas of expertise and then reach out to them when questions arise. Creating a formal problem-solving "process" for yourself can alleviate the feeling that the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Plus, creating a board forces you to step outside the day-to-day tasks of running your business and to connect with people — something we too often dismiss as superfluous when we feel crunched for time.

You may already know who you would ask to be on your "board," but if not, here are a few effective ways to go about building your advisory team.

The lowest lift but hardest "conversion" is to send cold emails to other founders. Most people don't respond, but sometimes you strike gold. About 10 years ago, I wrote to Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo. He gave me some incredible advice that helped my fitness business (even though his experience had nothing to do with fitness), and we still keep in touch today.

Related: 4 Ways To Defeat Entrepreneurial Loneliness

Another easy entry point is social media. While these platforms can become a death scroll waste of time, they're also filled with successful people connecting and sharing their journeys. In particular, LinkedIn and Twitter have become a hotbed of conversation where people frequently "build in public" — discussing problems they've faced and solutions they've found.

These threads are an opportunity to observe, learn, and — most importantly — participate in the conversation. Leave comments, ask questions, and connect as genuinely as possible. You'll be surprised how much you learn, and how social interactions become real relationships.

You can also go to more traditional networking events and conferences — but make sure to interact with people outside your realm of business. The best way to jumpstart your thinking is often to find unexpected perspectives from different worlds. Great leaders seek out a range of insights, and then use a mix of intuition, knowledge, and experience to apply what they've learned to their own problems.

All of this might sound contradictory to the entrepreneurial go-it-alone ethos, but set all ego aside. Connecting with others will make your job a little less lonely, along with something much more powerful: It will help you build confidence in your decisions. That is a competitive advantage that will push you leaps and bounds.

Related: Why Lifelong Learning is the Key to Entrepreneurial Success