Learning: Theory and Practice

Through a lot of my early life, I’ve absorbed all the knowledge theoretically. I’ve enjoyed it, but I’ve often left feeling that I haven’t actually learned it. Now I try to follow the mantra that I won’t really know it until I try it. 

Once I have an idea I try to validate it. If some opportunity comes my way, I try to check it out whether it’s worth pursuing asap. Let’s say I’ve been learning digital marketing. I know a lot about it. At the end of the day if I just know about it – does it mean that the knowledge is worth anything at all? That’s why now I’m learning to apply what I’ve learned practically, that way there’s clear value coming out at the other end. Typical business consultants are usually quite the opposite though. They talk about the high-level, but often can’t go into depth… That requires practice and often they don’t have it. The question is do they need it? Maybe it’s a different niche, but it would give them extra credibility.

 I find myself a bit of an anomaly as I find learning as my hobby. I try to hear about different things. At school alone I studied, economics, physics, maths, Spanish and then ended up going into Management in university. This diversity allows me to look at many different fields at once and see connections between them. Now that I’ve been working, I’ve taught myself fundamentals of programming and I can now write basic solutions. Learning the fundamentals of each new field allows me to see the world through a wider lens. I keep getting a new worldview.

However, even if I learn to code, I don’t consider that I know it anymore. If I can speak with programmers that’s the level where I classify myself at, which I’m fairly happy with. However, I’m definitely not qualified to say that I know the field. The same goes about the niches of digital marketing. I know high-level concepts of most channels and techniques, however, I can dive deep only with a couple. Those that I’ve implemented myself and spent hundreds of hours on. 

Learning things at high-level is easy and quick. But as soon as you go deeper, you start to understand how deep the rabbit hole actually goes. That’s the same about every field. Once you’ve reached that point you start realizing why the 10,000-hour rule makes sense. To be world-class at something, you must spend ridiculous amount on it, in deliberate practice. 

Enjoy The Little Things

One of the more important things that I’ve learned throughout my life is that you don’t have to do something grandiose to be happy. Enjoy the process, the little things that are there daily. It sounds much easier to do than it actually is.

Sunrise on a clear morning is one of the prettiest things that nature can offer us. You can just stare at it and forget about all the problems that you have. At that moment you just bathe in its beauty. Or going to the forest and engulfing yourself in all the greenness around you. You get completely lost in it. It forces you to relax and to take a look back at your rhythm, to take a look at your chaotic mind and help it take a break. 

I personally have an issue that my mind is always on, always full of thoughts. Doesn’t matter if it’s 1 am or 2 pm, I’m always thinking. I find this simply annoying as it doesn’t allow me to relax. Ever. Personally, being in nature and focusing on on these little things helps quiet the mind.

Once you go to the mountains and you see the vastness of the world your thoughts suddenly become insignificant. There’s so much space around. You can stop and just observe. Breathe in, breathe out and just let yourself be. I don’t know about you, but once I do this, I relax almost immediately. It makes me feel grateful that I have these opportunities to just be with myself in nature. Don’t get me started about sunrises in the mountains in winter… Everything’s white around and then the pink glow rises from the top of the mountains. All of them become beautifully pink… It’s almost as if you’re in a fairytale. At that moment you cannot do anything but smile. You forget about yourself, your problems, your quarrels. It’s just you and the mountains. 

Little things are not only about nature. Appreciating a joke that your coworker told you can make both of you much happier. Maybe you did this one task at work? Feel proud of yourself! It’s important to understand that we only have a limited amount of time and the most effective way to use it, is to be happy every day (however cliche this may sound). It’s not achieving some kind of goal and then being satisfied. The moment when you achieve it is short, but the journey towards it… That’s where the fun really is. 

The thing I’ve learned is to celebrate the small wins, appreciate the little things and spend more time in nature. I’m not perfect and I don’t follow these rules all the time. However, I try and they make my life much more enjoyable every day. 

Cost Of Doubts

Doubts are very powerful emotions. They make you stop acting. They catch you as if a spider catches a fly in its spiderweb. You’re stuck. 

Doubts can be good if they help you rethink your lifestyle choices and eventually help you make a decision. For example, if you were doing something that you shouldn’t be doing or that doesn’t align with your life ethos and goals, doubts will be there to help you reconcile. If you’ve been smoking for the last 10 years and doubts come in whether you should continiue, that’s probably a good thing.

However, much more often doubts make us stuck in the flow of inaction. Thousands of people including me don’t act when rationally thinking we really should. We may not start writing the book that we dreamed about, may not start playing the piano or simply may not reconnect with our old friends. The reason? Doubts.

We may fear that this thing that we’re doing right now is not the what we should be doing. Or we fear that we shouldn’t even start something because we’re not going to make it anyways. Sometimes don’t take action because we fear the possibility of actually achieving what we set out to do.

There are hundreds of reasons why we can doubt something and not act. The key, in my opinion, is not to let that emotion linger for too long. Decisions help with the momentum massively. They’re the things that let us move forward with a graceful pace. Once you know what to do – just do it. It’s much better to make a mistake and then correct it rather than not doing anything at all.

The biggest regret of people on their deathbed is not that they’ve tried something and failed, but that they didn’t try it at all. Don’t let doubts rob you of the life you deserve. Do the thing you’ve been delaying today.

Permission to Create

Going through school, university and the typical education system we learn that we have to get permission to do something. If we want to do a project we have to ask someone first if it fits the grade standards. If we want to do specific coursework, we must make sure that it suits the class topics and so on. We’re trained to ask for permission. 

Life is not like that though. We don’t need permission to create something fantastic, to start a new movement, to make a change. It’s an important realization for me, especially at times when I lack faith and I feel that there’s nothing I can do. The truth is, the reality is malleable and you can do anything you want with it. It doesn’t mean that you will succeed in changing it, but the fact that it’s possible empowers me.

It’s true that 90% of startups fail and only 10% of them succeed. It’s completely irrational to start one knowing the statistics. However, once you realize that the idea is not just about the money, but about the meaning of the work you do. If there’s only 10% chance you’ll succeed, but it’s 10x more worthwhile doing that than just working somewhere – go for it! Trying to change the status quo is definitely not easy and not for everyone, but it’s an exhilarating choice.

The world doesn’t change by its own. It’s changed by the people who don’t wait to get permissions. The people who go out and do magnificent things on their own accord. As Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”. 

Throughout my short life, I’ve learned that you don’t need permission to make a change. There are hundreds of things that you can and should do. As Seth Godin says – go make a ruckus. 

We’re All Different

I think of myself as someone who can live with uncertainty fairly well. I don’t panic straight away if something’s not exactly as I want it to be. However, I’ve learned that it’s not the case with everyone. 

We have the tendency to assume that everyone sees the world in the exact way as we do. We know that people are different, however, we don’t consciously understand it when we go about our days. Traveling is one of those places where our biases are slightly dimmed.

Multiple Natures is a philosophy that helps understand the underlying differences between individuals. The philosophy goes deep, but let’s just look at the basics. 

Each person has 9 natures (Protective, Educative, Administrative, Creative, Healing, Entertaining, Providing, Entrepreneurial, Adventurous) and 10 intelligences (Bodily Fine, Bodily Gross, Interpersonal, Logical, Linguistic, Visual Graphic, Visual Spatial, Musical, Intrapersonal, Naturalistic). They’re pronounced differently in different people. The intelligences help you explain what type of skills you’re good at, while the natures show you where you’re likely to use these skills. Or rather where you’d like to use them. 

Here’s an example of someone with a high adventurous nature (John) vs someone with a low one (Lucy). John loves to go on adventures, going on the unbeaten paths, taking a lot of risks, everywhere. While Lucy will take the safe path, she doesn’t want to experience stress, she’d like to keep things calm around her. John would love to go skydiving, but Lucy isn’t too keen. John would love a job where he has to take risks, but Lucy would prefer a stable one. This is a crude example, but it helps drive the point home. 

This is just one way how you can look at the natures. Viewing the world through this lens makes you better aware of how different each of us is. Furthermore, by discovering your natures and intelligences you become even more aware of yourself and why you act the way you act. 

Practical Financial Advice: More Money, Same Lifestyle

I’ve learned that the most obvious advice on how you can save money is to not “enhance” your lifestyle when you earn more. Once you get a pay-rise the point is not to instantly buy that new car you always wished of. 

It’s very common for people to start spending more as soon as they earn more. Let’s take an example: if you earned €1000 per month and then you got a raise and started earning €1500. It’s very likely that you’ll just end up spending it all. You’ll usually have a nicer car, go to nicer restaurants, stay in fancier hotels on holidays, but that’s about it. Just think what would happen if you saved that €500 (or at least 50% of it!).

The challenge is to keep the same lifestyle you had with €1000 per month. As mentioned, saving that €500 extra per month opens up enormous possibilities. Let’s say you invest that €6000 per year (500×12) for 10 years. At the end of the period, it will become ±€83000 at an average of 6% interest compounded.

Even if you don’t invest, having that buffer allows you to live a much safer life, without as much stress. This is because you know that even if you lost your job, you’ll still be well off. On top of that, there’s a saying. Money creates more money. When you have a lofty sum, you can buy a house and then rent it off, get a passive income of sorts. 

Eventually, if you’re savvy and lucky enough, you can live the dream by having passive income and only working as a hobby. It’s a long way towards that, not achieved by many, but it’s entirely possible and it’s in your hands. 

The moral of the story is, once you get a pay-rise, don’t inflate your lifestyle. Keeping it the same may just bring you wonders down the road. 

Survivorship Bias or Why You Shouldn’t Trust Successful People’s Advice

We love hearing stories about successful people, how did they do it. We hope that we can repeat these habits and reap the same benefits. However, there’s no certainty that if we do what they did, we’ll have the same rewards. 

We tend to ignore all the unsuccessful people and focus on the ones that achieved it. Nevertheless, if you think about it there are many other factors that influenced their rise to the top. Could it be that they were from a well-off family and got a “small loan of one million dollars”? Maybe they just got lucky and were at the right place at the right time? Maybe they’re just higher risk takers overall, as a state of mind? 

Survivorship Bias as defined in Wikipedia is “the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility”. Which basically means that the survivors tell the stories, but we actually ignore the failures. The reason why they’re successful as mentioned above may not be the reason they’re saying it is. They themselves are might be unaware of it. 

We can learn much more when we start comparing successful people with the ones that failed. Not just the successful versus the successful. Why did the 100 individuals with similar skills as the single successful person didn’t become rich? If we can see the difference, this can be very informative and helpful. However, if we compared 100 successful people to each other we will usually not get that much useful information.

There are a lot of articles regarding this concept and books written about it. I’d highly recommend having a look at this article for starters.

Also, the video below illustrates this bias brilliantly in 4 minutes. 

Beginner’s Mind is The Key to Rapid Learning

Come into a conference, hear about a topic that you’re completely familiar with and think “Ahh, this is a waste of time, they’re not telling me anything new”. Have you ever been in this situation? Well, that was (and still is) me quite often. Over the years though, I’ve learned how to silence the thought, the feeling that I know what the person is going to say. Even better, I’ve started approaching conversations with the idea that I don’t know anything at all, that I’m a beginner. 

Beginner’s mind is all about trying to understand everything from the basics. It’s coming into a conversation, a conference or into any information exchange with the preconception that you know nothing. You’re eager to learn. You’re much more interested in what the other person has to say, rather than listening to your own narrative in your head. Let me try to show this with two examples when I speak to a marketing specialist Bob.

Conversation #1 Bob: SEO is about reaching people who are searching for items like yours.  Me: Great, I’ve heard that page load speed does wonders to your score, right?   Bob: Yeah, I’ve heard it has quite a good effect. If you want, you can improve it with… 

Conversation #2 Bob: SEO is about reaching people who are searching for items like yours.  Me: Great, and how does it work?  Bob: Well, Google crawls the website with these so called “spiders” where they index everything and choose the most relevant websites for your search term. 

Me: Ok, but how do they know which website is the most relevant?  Bob: There are a lot of factors that come into it, be it page speed load, the keyword you have optimised and many others.

Me: How come?  Bob: Well over the years Google’s algorithm got increasingly complex and it’s changing all the time so that people wouldn’t abuse it and …

These two examples show just a glimpse of what Beginner mindset is all about. The first conversation is about me trying to show that I know something. I have a narrative in my mind and I’m trying to steer the conversation to where I’m familiar. I’m not intrigued in learning anything new really. I assume I know it all. With this kind of closed questions, I don’t really develop the conversation.

Conversely, in the second example, I start with open questions right away. I don’t have a preconception about what to do. I’m eager to learn how does it work, what’s important here. With these kinds of questions, I could’ve carried on the conversation forever and learned a lot. Notice how I’m actively listening, but probing deeper… The answers I get are also much broader, which give me a better understanding of the context.

Having a beginner’s mindset is all about the willingness to learn every day. It’s about having an open worldview, approaching the concepts as if you don’t know anything about them. Traveling is also a way to “reboot”. It makes you realise that you don’t really know much at all.

One of the quickest ways to learn about new concepts is to be perceptive to new perspectives. If you think that you know everything, you’re unlikely to learn anything new. As Mark Twain has said “Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you would rather have talked” . 

The Way You Ask Questions is Important

Asking good questions is one of the most valuable skill you can have. A good use of it makes you able to learn much more and much quicker. 

Beginner’s Mind

Before we dive into questions themselves, let’s discuss an important concept that I’ve learned about – Beginner’s Mind. It comes from Zen and it is the idea to approach everything as if you don’t know anything about it, as if you see it for the first time. That way, you approach each situation with curiosity and the desire to know more, to understand the circumstances. Even if you’ve heard about a concept 100 times, approaching it with a beginner’s mind allows you to be receptive and to deepen your knowledge. However, if you come in thinking that you know everything, you won’t learn much. Most likely you’re not even going to listen, but rather judge the person speaking, as “you know everything already”. You may even consider the chat a waste of time. 

As you’ve probably realised by now, when listening and asking questions, it’s very useful to be in the Beginner’s Mindset. That way you can more easily actively listen to what the other person is saying. Active listening is not just hearing what the person is saying, but actually feeling it, understanding where he’s coming from, empathising with him. Once you’re in that state, asking good questions is actually quite easy. 

Questions

There are hundreds of ways you can ask a question, but it falls into two categories – closed and open. Closed questions are the ones that ask for a yes or no answer. Some examples are “is that right?”, “would you like to buy this product?”, “that’s cool, right?”. They’re usually used to clarify whether you heard something right, to get a clear answer – yes or no. With this type of question, you may get the answer you want, but not necessarily the information with it. 

Open questions, on the contrary, are the powerful ones. They’re the ones that don’t have an inherent answer, for example, questions beginning with What, Why, How, etc. They let you learn more about things you don’t know. A simple question of “Why?” may uncover the reasons why a person acts in a certain way. Once you know that, you now better understand him and are more able to solve his problem (if that’s what you’re after). To get to the root cause of something there’s a technique called 5 Whys. The way it works is after each answer you ask “why?” again. It may sound silly, but after 5 answers you’ll probably go to the very roots of the person’s reasoning. 

Open questions can be used to understand our friends and hold genuine conversations as well. It’s much more helpful to ask “How are you feeling?” (open questions) vs “You’re feeling good, right?” (closed question). The first one is much more sincere and opens up space for a conversation, while the second one shows that you’re not interested. 

Questions are a powerful tool, that can help you understand people and the world in a much clearer fashion. It uncovers people’s biases, beliefs and may help you to change your worldview in the process. 

What’s SEO? A Brief Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about making sure that you rank the best (amongst the first results) on a search engine. It’s as much art as it is a skill. The idea behind it is so that people could find your business online at the point when they’re looking for something specific. 

I’ve completed Rand Fishkin’s free short-course on SEO on SkillShare. It was brilliant, quick and to the point. I’ve learned that the essence is to think about search as a user. Think how would the user search for something that you’re offering. How can you solve his problem? The whole process of SEO boils down to this simple truth. Google is thinking in the same terms – they want to give the user the best possible answer as quickly as possible. That’s all there is to it, that’s the reason why the algorithm is constantly changed. Throughout the years Google got really clever how to find the “signs” that your content is trustworthy and worth reading for each search term. 

In the beginning it used to be the ranking algorithm, where the back-links mattered the most (i.e. how many sites linked to yours). If you had 1000 websites linking to you it meant that you had pretty good content. Over-time google looked at more and more metrics to figure out if the reader’s query was answered in the best possible way. Here are 9 factors that Google ranks site by now (note: they’re always changing!): 

  1. Domain-Level Link features, aka “Domain Authority”. It’s all the links that come from other websites.
  2. Page-Level Link Features, aka “Page Authority”. It’s all the links that point to an individual page. 
  3. Page-Level Keywords, Content Features and “Keyword Targeting”. It’s about the keywords that are in the title, the content, and other locations. Essentially is how consistent your keywords are across your website, your content. 
  4. Page-Level, Keyword Agnostic Features. This includes load speed, mobile friendliness, content uniqueness, length and size of the page, etc. 
  5. Engagement, Traffic and Query Data. This is a bit more complex, but the essence is that once a user goes onto your website he doesn’t leave (because he found the answer). If he hits “back”, then it’s a signal that he didn’t find what he was searching for and that website’s ranking will fall. Examples of this are “Pogo-sticking”, “Query Success”, etc
  6. Domain-Level Brand Features. For example branded search, direct visits, brand affinity, etc. It’s about how well do people recognise your brand. 
  7. Domain-Level topic and keyword associations. For example domain name, topic modeling, niche authority, etc. It’s about being the expert in your niche. 
  8. Domain-Level Keyword Agnostic Features. For example TLD extension, spam signals, trust signals, traffic data, etc. This is a bit more technical and you should delve deeper into these keywords if you’re seriously interested in SEO. 
  9. Social Data and Features. For example Tweets, FB shares, Linkedin shares, etc. This is not actually as important to rank well on Google as many people think. Thousands of shares, won’t necessarily boost your SEO ranking tremendously. It works more as an indirect tool for now. 

These are the features that I’ve learned about from the course. If you have about two hours to spare, I’d highly recommend to take it and if you’re into books – also read Rand’s work – Lost and Founder. It’s the most honest book about startups that’s out there right now.