Stop Learning, Start Doing

This may sound a little nuts at first but bear with me… Stop learning.

Take your headphones out and stop listening to your favorite podcast. Close your Chrome tabs that house the list of blog posts you need to devour. Put your stack of Tim Ferris books back on the shelf and out of your line of sight. I mean it. Close it down. Now wait and see what happens.

You will never know everything… and you don’t need to know everything in order to get started.

One of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship is deciding what to do next and when to do it. This indecision is often the result of too many ideas. In my personal experience, this indecision can also be the outcome of too much information input. It’s too easy to tell yourself you need to listen to every single podcast on a single resource or learn the totality of an entire subject matter before you can begin creating for yourself or using the strategies you’re learning. The trick here is that you will never know everything. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t take the time to learn but I am begging you to be strategic about it.I personally wasted a lot of time during the early months of my business trying to absorb every single book and blog post that claimed to have the “best practices” in entrepreneurship. I read all the cannons of entrepreneurship: Rich Dad Poor Dad, The 4 Hour Work Week, The Lean Startup. Did I learn a lot from that process of information intake? Definitely. Could I have learned even more by getting out there and putting in the hours of work that it takes to figure shit out? You bet I would’ve.

Here are some of the things I do to be strategic about my learning process:

1. Plan your learning in phases or seasons. I use a “one month on / one month off” schedule because that’s the amount of time that I know it takes for me to fully learn and engross myself in a single topic. Likewise, that second month is the amount of time that I need to successfully implement, launch and test a new component within my business.
2. Use very specific business goals to guide your learning subject areas. Don’t waste your time by making a single subject area a severe focus if it isn’t relevant to your company. How do you know if it is or isn’t relevant? If it doesn’t immediately affect your bottom line or move your company forward in a particular metric that you’ve already established, than it isn’t relevant.
3. Set deadlines for yourself, either in length of time committed or by using a relevant benchmark within the subject area (read through chapter X of book Y, for example). For me, if I haven’t fully learned a new subject within the month of time that I’ve committed, than I need to 1) consider a new learning tool or learning method (sometimes I switch from book to podcast), 2) consider more specificity in the learning subject matter (sometimes I try to learn too much at once), or 3) consider taking stock of how the learning goal affects my bottom line (maybe I’m not succeeding because the learning goal is not as relevant as I initially thought).

Take a look at your own process for “downloading” new information and learning. If you don’t have a process, think about how you can start to integrate a strategy and give yourself a hard deadline for a very specific subject area.

I originally wrote and published this article for Prsuit.com in 2015.

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