When it comes to business and marketing education, there’s so much to learn and it’s all so interesting. It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of professional development and forget that the goal of all the learning is to implement.
I’m a big fan of a guy called Gary Vaynerchuk. If you’re kick-starting a business and you don’t know who he is, do yourself a favour (as Molly used to say) and check him out on YouTube!
Gary has a gazillion followers. He’s a content-producing machine and I love all of it. But he said something interesting in a video the other day—that his ultimate goal would be for no one to be following him. Because that would mean everyone who had been following him went out and took his advice and became a huge success and no longer had time to follow him.
It really made me think.
For five years, I hosted the Queensland Business Writers Conference (and also got to Perth and Adelaide in my travels). By 2016, hundreds of people had attended this event—generally communications staff looking to upskill or be reminded of what they’d forgotten in the day-to-day grind of being a business writer.
Now that I’ve wound up the conference, I wonder about all those people. I wonder if they learned something that totally changed the way they worked. I wonder if they got the other comms staff together for a brainstorm or workshop to implement their learnings. And I wonder if they did nothing with the information they’d received.
In this age of information overload, it’s easy to get stuck in the ‘learning’ part and forget about the ‘doing’ part. All the professional development in the world won’t help without implementation.
I am as guilty of this as anyone. I follow some brilliant business minds on social media—or just ‘social’ as the kids are calling it now! I watch videos on the bus and listen to podcasts late at night. (We’re so privileged to have so much access to these minds every day. It makes the learning curve much easier.)
But how much of it do I implement? Not enough.
The good news is that there’s still time. Let’s pause for a moment to go back to some of our learnings—to remind ourselves what we learned this year and haven’t implemented.
Did we promise ourselves that we’d:
- create a style guide to keep our writing consistent
- blog at least every two weeks this year no matter what (Yes. Yes I did…)
- create a content calendar to consistently produce videos, social media posts and blogs
- master Facebook advertising to get our fabulous ebook out to the world, collect email addresses and start offering our services to an enthusiastic audience?
Theoretically, all this access to great minds should make us smarter. And maybe it does—but it doesn’t make us experts. We become experts by doing: trying, failing, analysing, tweaking and trying again. Putting our own spin on things and slowly becoming the followed instead of the follower.
That’s the missing link between good and great.
What fabulous thing have you learned that you haven’t yet implemented?