Seek The Knowledge You Need
Not what is the most popular –
Last night I was at a conference in Southwest Florida.
This was cool because there aren’t usually conferences down here, and if they are they are usually just Wordpress meet-ups or other things that I’m genuinely not very interested in. This one was different.
Brian Halligan, the CEO and Co-founder of Hubspot was giving a Q&A at this event (which is pretty much all the event consisted of). As a content marketing consultant, and a huge proponent of inbound marketing, I thought this would be a fantastic opportunity to soak up some serious knowledge about my craft.
I was both wrong, and very right. Here’s why.
The Expectation
My expectations were all over the place. I knew it would be small because it’s an event in Naples, Florida, which is one of the smallest places I’ve ever been to. If this were going to be remotely big it would have been in Orlando, Miami, or Tampa, but no, it was in Naples.
This was cool though, because it would be more intimate, and I thought I would be able to ask some really in-depth questions that I’d walk away from with some deep knowledge.
Having a high expectation for what you’re going to get, and not being real with yourself over the information you are most likely going to be sucking in is a very toxic thing to do to yourself. I should have known that it would be very Hubspot focused, pushing their new products, and not really revolving much around the world of inbound marketing.
The Event
The event was quaint. It was a small little room filled with about 25–30 people, and I, my brother Jeremiah, and our good friend Raymmar were among them. The questions started rolling out from the organizers of the event and they were as you would expect, pretty generic, not really well thought-out, some were cringe inducing, and some were actually pretty interesting.
I noticed really quickly that I might have wasted my time driving 2 hours down here just to hear these generic questions and answers, but that was before the organizer’s answers stopped and the crowd’s answers began.
The Diamond in The Rough
When the questions from the crowd started I actually got really excited. Suddenly there were a lot of interesting things being talked about, and I started taking notes like a mad-man. I wish it had been this way the entire time.
In particular one man, the owner of an inbound marketing agency in Florida, stood up and asked some very interesting questions that I personally really wanted to hear about, in growing an agency and what Brian recommended to people building inbound marketing agencies in today’s environment.
To give a bit of context, we have a growing team, a growing client list, great processes in place, and we are definitely in a growing phase with our inbound marketing agency (SimpleTiger) but this guy’s agency was at that next level where we definitely are looking forward to being at in the next six months to a year. I wanted to hear more from him.
The Applicable Knowledge-bank
I really didn’t care to hear anymore from the guy who just took his billion dollar business public, which was a strange thing to realize. All I wanted to hear about was more of what made this guy’s agency tick and grow. It was nothing against Brian, he has a great wealth of knowledge and experience, just nothing he would be in the lane of sharing is in the lane of what I need to know.
After the questions stopped rolling in to Brian and the “Fireside Chat” was over Jeremiah and I walked to the back of the room and introduced ourselves to Eric and immediately started jiving with him as to what he did to grow his agency, told him exactly where we were at and asked what he did to get from where we were to where he is. I was taking notes like a mad man:
- Hire a sales person
- Invest in personalizing your team to your potential clients
- Invest in more on-site content and reduce the barriers to entry for new clients
All sorts of things started pouring out of our conversation and I was so jazzed up that I immediately wanted to go home and get to work.
The lesson I immediately learned was to seek the knowledge you need to move forward right now, and get to work.
Then I remembered how Tim Ferriss recommended when you’re trying to learn a new skill, to not look for the most popular person in the world in that craft and hope that they will be able to teach you, but to find the person who is also world-class at what they are doing, and what you want to be world-class at, that has more time on their hands and are more likely to help you and let them be your mentor.
I was so happy that I actually gained so much from this event, but not by any means where I thought I would gain it from. That being said, Brian has a ton of great information to share, and if it weren’t for him being there, Eric wouldn’t have been there, so when you’re going to events, or seeking out mentors, try to find the diamonds in the rough that can give you the actionable insight you need to get from where you are to where you want to be — you don’t always need to seek what is the most popular, and sometimes it’s simply better not to.
