There are many great resources out there on all manner of topics. If you are at this site then there’s a good chance that entrepreneurship catches your fancy, on which there’s no shortage of good knowledge coming from web sites, magazines, books, associations, interviews, and so much more. Most of the time it’s information overload that we are dealing with, not information scarcity. It all sounds good, but with so much out there how do you put it to use?

For starters you need to accept that you can’t use it all. I have read a tremendous amount of information on many key aspects of business, yet at best I have mild expertise in a couple tiny niches. The collective mind of the human race has developed a vast set of data that cannot be taken in by a single person. Perhaps if you had a wise man (or woman) studying for an entire life, but who wants to learn all this stuff and not apply it?

I’m reminded twice of friends who kept making the same mistake in learning how to write computer programs. These are very different individuals who have never met each other. Each would come to me asking for advice on a particular programming language topic or algorithm. I’d help them out and sooner or later they would know that one technique. Yet to date neither has written any software program of significant length, convinced that they need to start by picking up large books on software design and studying for years. They are on their way to becoming keepers of very specific and sometimes obscure bits of computer science knowledge, but they haven’t progressed very far on becoming programmers.

Unless becoming a knowledge keeper is your desire, accept that most of that collective knowledge will never be yours and be grateful for what you are able to learn and apply! In the above case my friends would have actually learned far more by reading a little bit then diving right into writing a software program. Sure the first few programs would be quite terrible, but they’d actually learn far more through that personal experience than by trying absorb the knowledge from a book. At that point they would be ready to once again learn something from the experts and then give it a go again.

OK so it’s impossible to learn it all, but how does one go about learning more? How do you most effectively retain the great advice that you are picking up every single day such that it brings benefits into your life? In the framework of not retaining everything, we are more interested in being able to find the information when we do need it rather than having it for havings sake.

I don’t believe in attempting to create a miniature library, mostly because I’ve tried and it’s failed each time. Thanks to the internet, static information becomes outdated too quickly. Furthermore the internet already provides an amazing index of not just web sites but traditional materials, along with easy ways of obtaining the resources when you need them. Why try to rebuild something that is already there? It may be that the great piece of information you came across doesn’t need to be stored by you at all. Is it really something so special that you won’t come across it again when and if you are specifically looking for that information? Trying to hold onto too much knowledge is a flaw in itself.

If the advice, tip, or procedure is relevant and worth keeping then it needs to be stored or acted on. Again with the internet being the vast and constantly updated library that it is, I don’t believe in trying to unnecessarily store static copies of items. In many cases it makes sense to just store the location of the resource. If you are worried about the original material disappearing then having a copy of your own may make sense. You may wish to print it to PDF instead of paper, since filing cabinet space is many magnitudes more limited and expensive than your hard drive.

When storing information to revisit you need a sensible way of organizing it. Right now I’m experimenting with mind mapping, which naturally creates a nice topic drill-down structure. The mind map structure is naturally an index, with every node either containing or pointing to the right resource. My first layer of topics is very broad: “Business”, “Productivity”, “Programming”, “Technology”, “Cooking”. Below that I get more specific, for example “Business” has “Entrepreneurship”, “Marketing”, and so on. Delving into Marketing yields “Traditional”, “Internet” and “Software”. I’m only storing topics that I really care about. Every single piece of information that makes it in there must be something that I intend to revisit, such as a book I’d like to read in the future, an amazing database reference, or a recipe that I really liked. I will not actively seek out things to put in my mind map for the sake of having more information at my finger tips. That’s Google’s job.

What about acting on all this knowledge? If it’s something specific that can be acted on right away then it’s really easy. For example if you need to build a bird house and come across a bird house building article then it’s pretty obvious what happens next. What about less simple advice? Things that take a while to implement? What about those simple points that a business article or book makes, which in a single sentence hide the vast complexity of what they actually require you do? Here it’s a matter of making the leap from reading over the advice to consciously deciding to allocate the mental and physical resources to implementing it. After that … do it! Self help books often fail to give results because people get caught up in the idea that by simply reading the advice their problems will magically get fixed. The book sells the reader on the idea of minimal effort and in turn the reader expects to apply absolutely minimal effort to solving complex and difficult problems. Don’t skip over the little points of action that are sometimes hidden away. You need to act on what you read for there to be benefit.

Don’t forget your subconscious self in all of this! I find that what I consciously remember pales in comparison to the information I have stored-up which my brain somehow manages to pull out only when I come across a situation where I need it. I don’t always read books trying to consciously squeeze out specific information. I enjoy them, and the tidbits of knowledge I glean without ever putting pen to paper. I am confident that my brain has retained some important knowledge, and when I am going to take on a project that actively involves the information in the book then I can revisit it.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 6:54 am and is filed under Productivity, Achievement, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.