Stop Needing to Know Everything
When an adult is thrown into a pool of water, one of the first things that they do is attempt to reach with their foot to see if the can touch the bottom. This has become natural for us. We seek stability, and to fully understand our surroundings before acting.
But is this really natural, or is it a learned behavior?
Watch a video of an infant born in a pool of water. The child does not attempt to find stability, it simply moves around. It hasn’t learned yet to need that stability.
As an entrepreneur, rather you run your own company, or just have an entrepreneurial spirit in a larger company, part of the power you have is your ability to take action decisively. Large companies can be crippled by the mindset of “Ready, aim, aim, aim,” and perhaps, once everyone is fully on board, and it’s been reviewed by compliance, and all of the groups with internally competing agendas have been appeased, we might be able to fire.
The world is changing too fast for that. Gone are the days when you could pick a trade, apprentice to someone for a few years, and know what you needed to know for the rest of your career. Whatever your knowledge niches are, I am sure there are various areas of it, perhaps even ALL of the areas of it, where you don’t feel that you know as much as you should.
By all means, keep learning, but realize that knowledge and information are expanding faster than you can learn it all. If you spend too much time needing to get fully grounded you will find that once you have touched the bottom of the pool, everyone else has already started swimming forward. Worse, by the time you determine the bottom and get your footing, it has already started to change!
The information explosion age that we live in is an age that favors the improvisational. People who can quickly assess, make an intelligent gut-check, act, and then improvise with the newly learning information and incorporating changes are those who will win.
I have spoken to many groups on various topics, from Blogging, to SEO, to social media. Many of them have been interested. Unfortunately however, I know that ALMOST NONE OF THEM WILL ACT. They are afraid. They feel they do not know enough. All too often the mindset is, “Wow, that was interesting. I really need to get a book or something about that and learn more.”
But this is exactly where their minds will be six months later as well. They are caught searching for more understanding… reaching for the bottom of the pool.
Learn to be okay with reacting based on what you know or can quickly glean. Learn to realize that you will NEVER KNOW EVERYTHING on ANY topic.
Those who can act, improvise, and correct will excel even more in the coming years than they have in the past. While too many of the rest of us sit combing through data that is being generated faster than we can consume it. The day is now. Seize it!
