A friend came over with her 2 year old the other day and within less than 15 minutes everything in our daughter’s bedroom was off the shelves. One interesting toy after another.
So what? This is normal two year old behavior I hear you think.
Is it?
Not in this house. We teach our daughter to take one toy and when she’s finished, to put it away. At most she has two, maximum 3 out although that’s quite rare. She’s learnt to choose, pay attention to what she’s doing – even if it’s just 5 minutes, then choose the next thing. Even when we go to someone else’s house she stands back, observes then chooses one thing at a time. She doesn’t go into the frenzy of ‘NEW STUFF, MUST HAVE IT ALL AT ONCE!’. (yes, we have a perfect child…No, we don’t. But we feel this is one valuable habit we’re happy to have taught her).
Perhaps this is what you find yourself doing when you receive one email after another with a must-have offer, then log on to Facebook and see another series of must-have offers.
You need it all. I know. So do I.
Thing is, this is part survival instincts, part learnt behavior.
Survival will have us stock up on what we need to keep moving forwards in a way that is safe (think about your self of years gone by storing food for the winter months ahead or drought – for your modern self, the online business owner, that’s akin to e-courses).
Learnt behavior will have us want want want everything that grabs our attention without stopping to think about it lest we miss out. Short lived, instant gratification.
You can un-learn this to adopt a more efficient, paced approach to investing in your business knowledge. Here’s how:
- Unsubscribe from all but 5 newsletters that really inspire you (you can find all that how-to information by asking Google).
- Ask yourself – what, precisely, is the next step I want to take in my business? What is my precise intended outcome? Then, most importantly, does this course bring me closer to that intended outcome?
- Then, do I need this course to take me there or do I actually know this already? Am I acting from a place of perceived lack/lack of confidence or do I truly have gaps in my knowledge in order to achieve my goal?
- Now go schedule in just one hour a week where you work through every online course you’ve bought so far. List them in your ical or whatever it is you use as a weekly recurrent study date. Keep chipping at it and soon you’ll find you’ve gone through the material. A likely outcome is that you’ll realize you don’t need all that information, you know most of it already and your hunger for more without first consuming what you have will die down.
Remember, whatever must-have course that comes around, if it’s any good, it’ll come around again, if anything, bigger and better. So no, you won’t miss out.
Tell us, how have you learnt not to jump onto every must-have business offer that floods the online space?
