I recently came across an article published by Leo Babauta on his blog, zenhabits.net, in which he states that when he first started writing about David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” productivity system, he hadn’t read the book that started the whole GTD movement. He was simply getting his information from the internet. When Naomi Dunford from ittybiz.com released her e-book “SEO School”, she made a similar claim: she got the information for writing the book from the internet.
This is one of the many positive aspects of living in the Information Age: we can find information on just about anything we need simply by turning on our computer and logging unto the worldwide web. The negative aspect of living in this day and age is that there’s so much information out there that we can easily get caught in a spiral of reading and learning, and never actually getting to the doing. This is commonly referred to as “analysis paralysis”.
Leo and Naomi didn’t just read about GTD or SEO on the internet: they read about it, they learned how to do it, and they applied it. Below you’ll see how you can do the same.
The 25-50-25 Rule
A while ago I came across an article in the newsletter Early to Rise, in which Robert Bly presented “The 25-50-25 Formula” as a solution to analysis paralysis. The following quote from the article describes the situation well:
“All the information you are taking in has overloaded your circuits. You can’t process it all, sort through it, and figure out what to do first. So, instead, you do nothing. You take no action – other than to order yet another course or report to read.”
You’ve probably heard many times before that the best way to learn something is by studying it, observing someone else doing it, and then doing it yourself. (I’ve read that there’s a fourth step, teaching it to someone else, but we’ll ignore that step for purposes of this discussion.) Rob Bly explains that the 25-50-25 rule says that to put what you learn into practical action, you must divide your time as follows:
- Spend 25% of the time researching and studying the subject matter.
- Spend 25% of the time observing. For example, if you’re studying how to become an effective copywriter, surf the net and look for examples of copy writing that catches your attention and analyze how they applied–or failed to apply–the principles you read about.
- Then spend 50% of your time actually doing. As an example, if you’re learning about SEO, start implementing SEO every time you write a new article for your blog. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like you really know what you’re doing yet: get started and learn as you go along.
You’re Not a Researcher, You’re a Writer, Or an Internet Marketer, Or . . .
Charlie Gilkey from Productive Flourishing recently wrote a great article titled “Stop Lying and Start Creating” in which he talks about how lots of creative people get stuck in the researching stage of a project. He explains that many creative people will spend the bulk of their time doing research, categorizing the research, filing the research, making neat little labels so that they can easily find the research, and so on.
Although research is an important part of most creative endeavors, you need to set limits to the amount of time that you’ll spend in this preparatory stage so that you actually get started on the real work of creating. Charlie’s solution is to stop lying to yourself, quit procrastinating, and just get started already.
Taking Action Gives You Valuable Feedback
Anything that you do–any action that you take–will have an effect, so by acting you’ll be creating feedback with which to work. By acting you’ll either have more information on what works, or you’ll have more information on what doesn’t work. In either case, movement will provide you with real and immediate data on what you did right and where you need to make changes.
Analyze the feedback that you receive, decide what changes need to be made, modify your response, and act once again. This constant acting and tweaking based on an analysis of the outcome that you’re getting will accelerate your learning process a lot more than sitting down with yet another manual without actually implementing what you’re learning.
Conclusion
We know, of course, that the culprit is not the latest book on “How to Be a Writer” lying on our nightstand, or the latest e-seminar we’ve just subscribed to. The reason we don’t get started on “the doing stage” of the process is because we’re afraid. We’re afraid of failing, afraid of not knowing, afraid of criticism, afraid that if we mess up we’ll never get a second a chance . . . and the list goes on and on.
In order to succeed we have to put ourselves out there. Julia Cameron’s quote below illustrates this well:
“Very often audacity, not talent makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist – hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch.”
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I Recommend:
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