Help your startup grow. Learn a ‘new topic’ — fast!

Just starting out as a freelancer or launching your business idea? Perhaps you’re about to join with a fellow entrepreneur and need to understand partnership agreements? Or maybe you’re just about to hire your first employee?

Whatever the case, you’re exploring topics you’ve never needed to (or never heard of!) in the past.

You set-up on your own because you have a great idea, not because you’re an expert in every area of business, right?!

But, whether you’re freelance, an entrepreneur or a small business owner, there are a wide variety of topics that we have to understand to make sure we don’t get caught out.

By learning fast, I mean as fast as you can handle and probably over a few months. By ‘learning a new topic’, we’re not aiming to become such experts that we could switch careers. But learning enough to work out which questions to ask a specialist and when you need to outsource. Or enough to create detailed budgets and forecasts. Or enough to wrap your head around hiring your first employee…!

So how can you gain knowledge fast while maintaining focus on everything else? It’s time to graft.

These 7 tips are my January gift to jump-start your learning adventures.

1. Take stock

Write down why you want or need to explore this topic. If the ONLY answer is ‘because I have to’, it’ll be a challenge because you’ll lack the geekish fascination that makes learning so much easier. If you need to wrap your head around new legislation, then view it as a tool to help you do what you love (launch your app, or find others to help you achieve your goal) with even more accuracy and clarity.

Write down everything you know (or think you know). Then wave goodbye to your assumptions and confirm that everything you think you know is correct.

Getting started with a new topic is pretty challenging because, well, you don’t know what you don’t know! But write down all the gaps in your knowledge that you are aware of. It’s a great place to start.

2. Divide and conquer

Your goal might be to ‘learn everything about hiring my first employee’. But if you write that on your daily to-do list then the suffocating enormity of the topic will mean you’ll never get started.

Scribble down some broad research topics and start with the area that naturally grabs your attention.

I recently attended an app development focus group led by a brilliant facilitator. He encouraged us to speak up about weird and wonderful, ‘off-topic’ ideas as they arose. But anything not strictly related to the core app idea went onto a post-it note and into the ‘car park’ (a ‘parking lot’, for my American cousins) on a whiteboard.

I’ve adopted this personally and it’s AWESOME! I have a ‘need to find out now’ list when I’m writing articles about niche topics, but I use the mini-whiteboard on my wall to write larger topics, questions, or ideas to research. A few of these (based on my new-ish area of Tech copywriting) are:

• Virtual Reality — how does it actually work?
• Medical Tech and/or neural lace tech/brain-computer interfaces — who’s monitoring the ethical side?
• Do I want to be able to upload information directly to my brain instead of needing to research and remember… Is anyone trying to do this…?

Whilst researching, you might stumble across sites related to your topic. Index is my favourite tool to keep links organised by topic or hashtag labels. I love it becasue I can stop emailing myself links that I forget to read.

Create a glossary of definitions as you discover them and keep adding to it. If you see a quotation or statistic, follow right back to the source report, book, speech or article — you might uncover a goldmine of information! Learning leads to learning and you’ll absorb so much more information when you continuously drill down to the source.

3. Immerse yourself

Kids don’t learn grammar and syntax when learning to talk. No, they mimic the way Mummy or Daddy or Auntie or Nanny talk. They learn through immersion.

Carve out sacred, protected learning time and don’t let anything distract you.

Wanting to learn without dedicating time is the same as buying a new gym kit and hoping that, by carrying it around in your bag, the extra festive weight will melt off you and you’ll run the marathon. Yeah… Life’s not that kind! Rapid learning doesn’t happen via osmosis, so you’ve gotta put the hours in.

Learning can be a fantastically meandering adventure so give yourself permission to wander off topic. But, remember to keep chucking the ‘not strictly relevant’ things into your car park for exploration — avoid falling down the bottomless rabbit hole of information!

4. Find your own style

Work out how you learn best, but step back and mix your sources to speed up the learning.

Take advantage of every spare moment by saving books or articles on your phone for unexpected train delays, or to read while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil. Of course, we all need to relax, and that’s what Candy Crush is for, but why not replace a few Candy Crush sessions with TED Talk..?

Handwritten notes and the ‘chunking’ technique both help us to absorb information.

But I find that storing information visually helps too. Drawing spider diagrams or flowcharts instead of sentences helps me remember different types of information, and colours really help me. My two most trusted learning companions are my highlighter and my cheap, multicolour pen (a curse on anyone who steals it!).

5. Find the best information

We’re so lucky. Digitisation means we have access to more information than ever before, from sources all over the world. Not only that, we have access to all of this information in our pockets, 24 hours a day. But there’s a lot of rubbish out there too — be careful.

The iPhone 6’s clock is 32,600 times faster than the best Apollo era computers and could perform instructions 120,000,000 times faster… there’s no excuse not to learn!

So, it’s time to kneel in the Temple of Google and get geeky!

If you establish industry websites with ‘real’ or verified information about your topic, then you can focus your Google search to just reveal articles from that site.

In this example, I’ve identified the World Economic Forum as a great source. All I need to do is search the site (by typing ‘site:’), insert the URL (www.weforum.org) and then type the word or phrase I’m searching for (ethical). Bam! Information I want, from a site I trust.

Use advanced searches, time-specific searches and all sorts both on Google and on LinkedIn/Twitter. Tiny tweaks to your searches make them more accurate and will save you valuable time.

Speed reading is another great way to plough through vast amounts of information. But if you know you tend to dwell on each word, then hit ‘ctrl+F’ to search within any webpage for the keyword/s you need. It also helps to quickly read every heading and subheading within the article to avoid missing any important content.

6. Don’t aim for perfection

There’s no way that you can learn as much in a few months (in your spare time!) as you would via your a degree or formal studies. So, be brave.

• Turn your learning up a notch by attending industry events. Why not be honest and tell other attendees “I’m new to the field — do you have any advice for me?”. Enjoy the liberation of inexperience and nurture your blossoming knowledge!
• Stalk the experts online (in a non-creepy way…). Use advanced searches on Twitter and LinkedIn to connect with or follow influencers in the field and see what they’re writing about. Explore the information they post and don’t be afraid to ask their advice or ask them to clarify something they’ve written. Explain that you’re learning as much as possible about the field — you know they’re an expert so you value their advice (flattery goes a long way..!).

You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how many people are willing to help by offering advice or guidance.

7. Dig, dig and keep digging

If you reach a point where you’re stuck, ask for help. Or embrace the topic more formally and take a course, or start a distance learning degree.

Yes, to become true experts we need knowledge that’s inch wide and mile deep. But whilst learning about a broader topic we have to explore far and wide!

Let’s imagine that you dream of a career in Art History, but currently just love art. You could start with your favourite period or artist. Who did they learn from, who were their influences? And who influenced their teachers? What was happening in local politics at that time/when they were adolescents/in the wider world? Were they popular, or were they forced to paint in secrecy…?

What would it feel like to be in their position? What type of brush did they use to paint with? How were brushes made and, more to the point, how was paint made?

Get really specific, get geeky and then you really have something to talk about.

Knowledge is power and, as your startup grows, you’ll need to grasp the basics of a vast range of topics. Sure, you’ll hire experts along the way and you’ll always need to seek advice from specialists. But without a basic understanding of every area of your enterprise, how will you know what ‘good’ work looks like?

Yes, this all means extra work on top of the long hours your undoubtedly already putting in. Is it worth the extra effort? That’s up to you….

Focus on the bigger picture by learning fast, now.

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