This was inspired by another great post by Steve Layman. I’ve extracted the entire article from RyanHoliday.Net – – I felt it was that good…it’s called: To Really Know Something.
“One of the most aggravating parts of the media and marketing world I work in is the gurus and experts (charlatans is probably a better word). To them, everything is a theory or a chance to pontificate. Everything can be simplified and extrapolated. None of the natural laws—diminishing returns, unintended consequences, regression to the mean—ever seem to exist.
It’s less messy to think that way, sure. And comforting. It may even briefly be lucrative. But that is not how it really works. As much as a part of me wishes I could live in that universe, I don’t and can’t. It’s not how you get things done.
“See, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it really means to know something. And therefore, I see how it is that they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it—they haven’t done the work necessary, they haven’t done the checks necessary, they haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know how this stuff is done and they are intimidating people by it.”
That is Richard Feynman. What he’s talking about is the flipness of pseudo-science and the false confidence of delusion. Everything about the internet enables those impulses. From the segmentation to the lack of accountability, we forget what it really takes to know something. How hard it is to be truly sure.
That comes from rigor and discipline. From humility and understatement. It comes practices, checklists, from methods, and the scientific method. It comes from staying up late reading, not blogging. It comes from having deep connections with a handful of smart people who push you to be better, not networking. It comes from separating ideas from your identity—so you can pick up, discard, pick up, rearrange, discard and pick them up at whim.
To really study something almost inevitably eliminates the desire to talk about it. You don’t need to intimidate other people because you’re too busy checking your own assumptions to bother worrying about theirs. You’re not out trying to sell your theory to random people on the internet (and calling it Ryan’s Law or some indulgent shit) because you’re selling it to people who matter—people who actually pay you for your ideas.
All this takes time. That is, it can’t be done in real-time. So be patient and quiet and do the work. Check the experiments and put in the care. Then you start to know what it really means to know something.
Image: fruittreess.com
Fantastic and compelling post, David. Thanks!
Such a great post! Always nice to here a voice advocating depth in an age that lauds breadth.
David,
Your post, today, comes at a perfect time for me and 6 of my ‘sisters.’ We recently cut the ties and went out on our own, because the people who trust us and follow us and share our dream, really, really matter to us and rather than keep stringing them along as it seemed was happening with a ‘sole owner’ we were tied to (which I guess we can label, now, as our scientific experiment, because we learned so many wrong ways to do things) we are taking our time, keeping their attention because they matter, but really doing our homework as Steve suggests. There is so much more to being successful than building a site, drawing people in, and making money off of them. I thank you for sharing Steve’s post as it is a lesson EVERYONE needs to learn.
You can only prove your trustworthiness by knowing what you need to know and acting accordingly.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from this recent endeavor was that people whose only interests are being the ‘top dog,’ the ‘first,’ and making money before anything else can quickly be identified by their unexplainable paranoia, selfishness, and refusal to look into any idea that was not their own.
Thank you for this eye-opener. I hope many people benefit from it before it is too late for them.
~Louise
[…] I came across a fascinating article early this morning in one of my favorite blogs, Lead.Learn.Live by David Kanigan. You can read it here. […]