On my lap? Really?!
If you could see me right now, you’d see me sitting at my desk pounding furiously on my keyboard. I’ve got a cup of water next to my left hand, and there are some sunglasses and a hat by my right hand. Normal stuff.
But look to my left and you’ll find a pile of books about business and baseball. Look to my right and you’ll see an entire shelf of business books. And I just noticed that there’s even a business book sitting on my lap!
I love reading (apparently), but reading sometimes gets in the way of my learning.
There’s no shortage of books to read, podcasts to listen to, seminars to attend, blogs to subscribe to, or articles to skim over (like this one).
In other words, there’s no shortage of information to consume.
Sometimes I wonder, am I consuming information or is it consuming me?
I know the answer to my own question: both, but mostly the latter. Too often, the information is consuming me, and it may be doing the same to you.
It’s in our nature to look for answers.
We want to know how to do things.
So we read and listen and attend and subscribe and skim. And we don’t stop. We feel as if we’re making progress, but we may not be making as much progress as we think we are.
Instead, the “learning” has morphed into a fancy form of procrastination.
It’s gotten in the way of putting some action behind your idea.
One trap that I’ve found myself in over and over again is when I think that I’ll find the answers in the next book, in the next podcast, at the next seminar, in the next blog post, or in the next article. Just one more. Just one more. Just one more. Then I’ll figure it out.
But that’s not how it works.
Let’s get back to creating the answers.
When we’re operating in a space that has no clearly defined path to success, then there’s no sense in searching for a clearly defined path to success.
I’m in the entrepreneur space, which is one of those types of spaces.
It’s also one of those spaces with tons and tons and tons of information about how to be successful. It’s a space that has no shortage of “how to’s” or “34 steps to this” and “63 steps to that.” Entrepreneurship is a space with plenty of people giving advice to many folks who are hungry for it.
On occasion, I fall into the “giving advice” category. But I work very hard to give advice only about things I (think I) know. Mostly, I try to give perspective.
The challenge with all of the information within entrepreneurship culture—or any other undefined space—is that it all can distract you from your number one goal: figuring it out.
Think about this.
The people who wrote the books often didn’t read billions of books in order to write theirs. They most likely had a mentor.
But even with a mentor, they probably learned from the greatest mentor of all: their own experience.
They created their answers.
Maybe that’s the answer we’ve been looking for?
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Photo: Flickr/David Goehring
