Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Practice Makes Perfect
Did you know that scientists have arrived at the number of hours it takes to become a world-class expert at something?

Through years of study of experts in different fields, they found a common denominator in all of them. They found that each of them had more than 10,000 hours of practice in whatever skill they were known for.

It's the same for world-class athletes, musicians, scientists, writers, doctors... whatever the category, that 10,000+ hours of practice was absolute.

You note, I didn't say, 10,000 hours of study. I said 10,000 hours of practice. Practice takes you much farther than just studying does. The ancient Greeks had two different words for our term "to know."

Their word "oida" refered to intellectual knowledge. But they had another word, "gnosco," that described knowing by experience.

The Greeks drew a sharp distinction between simple book knowledge and knowing from experience. The experiential knowledge summed up in "gnosco" was always considered superior to the intellectual knowledge summed up in "oida."

They maybe didn't scientifically deduce the 10,000 hours needed to become a world-class expert, but they clearly understood that the only way to really "know" something was to put it into practice.

What does this mean for us?

One trap that most new business owners fall into is getting stuck in a constant pattern of studying marketing instead of doing it. Most of us come into online business lacking previous business experience. So we study. And we study. And we study everything we can get out hands on about marketing.

It's easy to stay stuck in that rut because we can always find new areas of marketing to study. We always feel we want to get everything down perfectly before we try our hands at it.

But what do both today's scientists and the ancient Greeks have to say about that rut?

Get out of it!

The only way to become a good marketer is to get out there and market. You learn far more by putting what you've learned from books into practice in the marketplace than what you learn just from the books.

I'll go into this more in upcoming weeks as I test this out for myself and share my results.

Until then, get going and put what you know into practice! You're on the clock. And you have 10,000 hours of practice to put into your business before you can truly feel that you're world class.
Jeff

Labels: mindset

Believing in Yourself
Here's a favorite quote from Norman Vincent Peale:

"People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. When they believe in themselves they have the first secret of success."

Jeff

Labels: inspirational quotes

Confronting My Inner Employee
Over the years, I don't know how many times I've weighed in on the subject of making the transformation from lifelong employee to entrepreneur.

It's a pet subject of mine because I've had to confront it so frequently.

I frequently hit roadblocks when it comes to setting the course for my business. As much as I hate being confined into carrying out someone else's vision, I find taking my vision and turning it into an action plan to be unfamiliar territory.

Right now, I'm working on a substantive reworking of my main website. In addition to a sleeker, more modern look, I'm reorganizing all the content on the site, pulling some and expanding it into more comprehensive training materials, updating other content, adding more content in areas that have proven most popular, and pruning areas that visitors haven't made much use of.

I'm planning new traffic-generating strategies to test and laying out a more consistent promotion schedule.

Yet, in all this, I find myself ready to defer to others for direction. I describe my options to my mastermind group and they offer opinions. One of them says, "You know what I'd do first? I'd do this and then that and then the other thing."

And I start noting that down as my direction. Wait a minute! She's not my boss! I'm not taking directions from an employer. I'm getting advice from a friend!

But I find myself falling back into employee mode and taking suggestions as directives from the boss. I even find it kicking in when I assess the content on my site. Sometimes I catch myself looking at it as if my task is to figure a way to redeploy articles, each of which MUST remain on the site. But I'm the guy who put it there in the first place!

I have to chuckle at all the ways my "inner employee" tries to divert me from setting and carrying out my own vision -- finding "bosses" to subordinate me to.

How to handle that "inner employee?" Keep moving forward. Laugh at its pitiful attempts. Building a business is a learning experience. Leaving that "inner employee" behind and uncovering the "inner entrepreneur" is only part of the journey.

Jeff

Labels: mindset

Expect Some Changes
Expect some changes over the next couple of weeks. I cleaned up some minor things in the blog template. I'm also making some major changes in my website as I refocus my business in some underexplored directions.

Stay tuned!
Jeff