Here’s one of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me:
Don’t just learn from your own experiences; learn from the experiences of others.
Learning from the experiences of others, is also one of the most effective (and fastest) ways to grow your business successfully.
That’s because:
- It’s a LOT less expensive to learn from the mistakes of others.
- By emulating their success, you can massively accelerate the development of your business.
The challenge here, is that in order to learn from others, you need to become a skilled observer. However; whilst most business owners and marketers are excellent at general observation, they are very poor at detailed observation.
Here are 3 simple ways that you can improve your commercial observation skills:
Step 1: Learn from the right people and companies
Sometimes, people in business are less than 100% honest with the claims they make about their commercial achievements. If you then try to emulate them and they are actually going nowhere, it’s going to be a total waste of time. You will, unknowingly, be copying a model of failure. I see this a LOT more often than you might think!
For example, I know a marketing guy on Twitter, who has tens of thousands of ‘fake’ followers. If you were to replicate how he uses Twitter, thinking it would build you a valuable network, you would fail. He actually used software that mass followed, then unfollowed hundreds of thousands of random twitter accounts. He then attracted tens of thousands of auto-follows – from people who automatically follow anyone who follows them. The day Twitter stopped that from working, his follower numbers stopped, then started shrinking! However, his follower count is still measured in the tens of thousands, which will fool many into thinking his approach works.
So, never just assume that someone is succeeding with something. Before you seek to emulate someone’s success, check them out as thoroughly as possible.
Step 2: Be selective, because what works for some may not work for you
Just because something works for one person, that’s no guarantee it will work for someone else. A great example of this is Seth Godin’s blog. Seth decided to switch comments off – so his readers could no longer comment on his posts. As a result, if people want to discuss Seth’s posts, they need to do so on services like Facebook, Twitter etc – which helps Seth reach even more people. A stroke of pure genius!
That approach works brilliantly FOR SETH, because he’s an international best selling author with millions of fans. If ‘the average’ blogger tried that same approach, they would anger their regular commenters and probably lose a ton of readers, being seen as arrogant or uncaring.
So, even if you know that something is working for another business or person, think about how likely it would be to succeed for you, in your unique situation, before you embrace it.
Step 3: Learn how to read data correctly
Very often, business owners and marketers will observe a business achieving a great result and totally misread how they did it. It’s very easy to look at information and come to the wrong conclusion.
For example, if I said that taking medicine is what kills the majority of people, you would rightly think I was nuts! However, if you look at the data, most people who die were on some kind of medication. However, that’s because the majority of people who pass away, do so after being ill, and thus taking some kind of medication.
You could use the same twisted logic to say Mary was a bad person and not to be trusted, because she spends her days mixing with criminals – when that’s simply part of Mary’s job as a police officer!
Here’s another example. Someone recently told me that she tried using the same retweet plugin on her blog, that I use here, but that it didn’t work. I asked her if it was installed correctly, and she replied that it was – but that very few of her readers used it. She assumed that the button was what generated the retweets, and not the content. Of course, the button only makes it easier for people to share what they want to share.
In my experience, the key to becoming an effective observer, is to take time to look beyond the obvious and then to apply good, old-fashioned common sense before taking action.
Over to you!
What do you think? What are your tips to become a better observer? Take a moment to share your ideas with the rest of us.