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Monday, August 27, 2012

Learning & Practicing: Before The Gold

The popular trend and technique books, and popular publications (even blogs) seem to focus on big picture topics. Can you really learn a skill and practice it from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers? You not only can, but in some cases you must. Maybe a few of us who think that all financial learning is done in New York or London, and technology work in Sunnyvale or Palo Alto can get to these global centers to learn a new skill (or profession). Yet most of us still need to learn and practice new skills in other places. Then demonstrate them to others to get a job, or simply do them to sell our services. We may even learn enough to build a product (not just a web site) and sell that. That to some would be the ultimate of learning and practicing. This brings up a point: how do you learn new skills from non-self-help books? This is not a new problem. A classic example is how Warren Buffett learned from "The Intelligent Investor" - which was not really written to teach professional investors like Buffett. Well, it can be done and actually this could be the key to success in many new skills and professions today.

Learning new skills and practicing them to expertise level is probably the most difficult barrier in using new technology. Although, You Tube, Linked-In, Facebook and Twitter are easy to use, they are just the base tool-set for marketing and promotion. If you are going to use new tools, you need strategies, techniques, tracking programs and domain knowledge (specific field of knowledge). You need to understand not only your specialty domain (i.e. portfolio management for individuals, restaurant promotion for upmarket cities) but also the specific skills of writing and editing, market research and potential customer intelligence - assuming you are going to be involved in creating, managing or selling products using internet channels. You also need to know the current state of affairs, in the past called "state of the art". In every field, innovations come quickly and the landscape can change in a matter of days. Experts in specific fields are adapt at knowing what is going now and how their field of expertise handles changes as they come.

The same goes if you are going to manage advertising campaigns and budgets. Not only just on the internet, the older media channels still count in most business fields. How are you going to put Gladwell's ideas into everyday use? How are key word selection (in AdWords) going to help you with globally spread target audience? Well, you can learn, it's a matter of taking abstract concepts and examples from different fields than yours, and making them relevant to your work. Using Gladwell's example, his observation is how people who are not in the centers of power end up beating the "market". This is exactly what Warren Buffett has done from Oklahoma City. While he did train in New York, he chose to practice investment advising from as indistinguishable location as possible. He could have even chosen Chicago or Los Angeles. But was more comfortable with his hometown as with any big city with some financial focus. This idea certainly applies to the internet business. There are great examples of both good work and product success from locations far away from the media and technology centers. Just notice the 10,000 athletes competed in the 2012 Olympic games. A vast majority coming from remote areas, competing on a world class level, in sports that are hardly popular. If this is not a great example of "outliers", I don't know what is.

What's next: how to be an outlier... from Gladwell to Blog

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