Some Aspects of the Learning Process

[RogueInnovation]

Here is the content I'll introduce or reintroduce in this post

Guess Success and trying the unknown the right way (what is the difference)
The Need For Stimulation
Maintaining your skills and forums in relation to work ethic (and the value you can gain)
Feeling Overwhelmed and The Next level
The Action Threshold
The Kinds Of Action (flat, rocky, underappreciated, bursts, consistancy)
Actual Business vs the ability to talk the talk (why lips are sealled)
Connecting skills, sales, design, marketting, writing etc and why there are so many guys here that know it better

This is really only scratching the surface, but its a start I guess.
I want to illustrate that the path to learning is NOT linear and that you cannot just "push" through. I want you to know that Push and Resourcefulness are meant to work in balance.
Use common sense and reason to dictate your actions, not "faith" in what you assume someone meant when they tried to give you advice.

As advisors, everyone can only say one thing at a time, and often it means that your personal emotions and assumptions are not going to be taken into account. So please be patient, both with yourself, and others (it helps if you know the learning process a little better, so hopefully I can show you something about it)

Guess Success and trying the unknown the right way (what is the difference)

- Starting out you will have old views on money (will take a few year to get over it probably and work, but in the end it won't matter much because it is a form of analysis paralysis),
- you will have no understanding of existing infrastructure, jargon, and concepts
- you will not have trust of the sufficiency of concepts, infrastructure and jargon or an understanding of how to relate to them
- you may not personally align yourself with the existing atmospheres, and attitudes, and you will not be aware of existing issues in the business community. You will not be aware of old hachets people have to bury, or agendas they feel have to be pushed, or how to comprehend their level of experience (and how to react to them)
- you cannot "see how you look" to an audience that has things to say about "your type" (which can be misconstrued) and will not know how to immediately respond with any level of tactfulness

As a result of all of these things you will be denied any real feeling of control or inclusion. You will feel like a curiousity that is attempting to do something that is an abstract to you, and not something you can hold or have held.
- you will not see where opportunities are
- you will be afraid to act on them if you do
- you will spend time reading (which may make you more indoctrinated or deluded rather than insightful or likely to be productive)
- you will lean on "hard skills" learning rather than business itself (meaning you will do programming, marketting, sales, writing etc)
- you will GUESS at what will create a successful outcome
- you will start feeling that "the right guess" must be what "they did", because this is your current "hope" and you find it hard to concieve of any way this will ever change
- you will feel like you are undeserving, aggressive, or some other thing and it will make you "give up" rather than stand there and learn lessons
- you will be evasive and because of the effort involved in your process and the "guessing" that had to go right you will be afraid of intellectual theft
- you will recognise a critique in certain markets, and use "dislike" as a tool to create, but your attempts will fall flat and you will assume its "them" not you

Guess success comes about because of all these things. Just look at how long that list is! The idea that any beginner can look at that list or something like it swirling in their subconscious like a Picasso painting of frustration and say "hey I have the answer to all of that!!!" is simply rediculous.
Rather, you will feel despair. And hope for SOMETHING that can pull you out of the maze, but it NEVER COMES. Its always against you.

The reality becomes "no one can overcome this except the chosen ones", and "if I believe this is easy and coast for 3 years I will go nowhere" (if you coast for 3 years you will just have an attitude of a coaster, if you work hard for three years, you will be a hard worker three years later, take what you will from that as this test emphasizes what traits you have).

You think that what is ahead of you is a guess or a leap of faith, but every day that proverbial carrot dangled on the string will get just a little bit further away. You will feel exasperated by this and as a result of that exasperation you will believe entirely that a CHANCE will come, or a guess will get you where you need to go.

And THIS is the idea of GUESS SUCCESS.

The reality of success is different, imagine a desert, and imagine that your compass doesn't work. Imagine that the radius of this desert is about 2-3 years deep. You have rations for about 3 - 6 months. A helicopter drops you blindfolded in a dune, and you see a mirage of water as you land, yet its not real (but you want to believe it is because the desert for three years, the heat, and the bullshit, makes its bitter introduction as you land).

You will remain in delusion for a very long time, because hope is a fuel of the person that guesses. And when you have no info and all the problems above, the mirages will be all you have.

No matter how clever you are no matter how strict a disciplinarian you have on your radio you cannot simply just walk out of that desert tommorow, unless you actually BITE the bullet that you can't, take that burden on and quit.
As in this desert the want to quit will come hand in hand with your self respect. It will be your only leverage. A sadistic, masochistic out button.

You may NEVER want to quit, you may have decided that, but more time in the heat is something you can't predict, so you can't in good faith tell people you will never quit, and so they will only listen to you a LITTLE.

When you start to have faith that you will never ever give up, you stop chasing mirages, and you do the extroardinary, something in you comes alive, and you tackle one problem after the next.

BAM
BAM
BAM

You get swept into a sandstorm, and you can't see anything else but "what you know you can do". You follow this internal compass. And you start using your mind to fill in all the details, all the mistakes become information, all the footsteps become achievements, and with a trust in yourself you realise that an ACCURATE plan is much EASIER than wandering around, and so you will JUMP on the opportunity of anything solid (not because you want OUT of the desert but because you will know its a solid process that is better than wandering).

Little actionable things become TOOLS for that wandering, starved, heat tortured soul that wandered for a couple of years.

Getting out of this desert will NOT mean you know your business!!!!!! It will mean that you finally pull your lips together, swallow, close your eyes for a moment and think.

You will stand there, for the first time, as the heat surrounds you, and the desert remains, and you will start brainstorming. You'll create jargon, you'll create ideas and concepts, and people around you will have similar ideas.
You will start sharing, and building, and you will enter a new phase.

Trying the right way to understand the unknown.
You will use little tools to dig up information, gain a larger picture, and over the next months you will "fill out" your mind with reasons and understandings. You will start to SEE CONFIRMATION for the little wins you make and the ideas you build.

The desert REALLY gets tough here. Because now there is NO WAY OUT and you are not a proven entity. All your confirmed ideas are dominos ready to fall. And in short you are vulnerable and uncertain.

But it is this position of vulnerability and uncertainty that pushes you to CONFIRM and question your assumptions. You gain a rationality, a way of thinking, and it transforms your whimsical fantasies into a different standard for success.

Ok, so this was all a preface to my true explaination:

Guess success assumes there is "success all around you", but the truth is more like "one partial success surrounds us". And when you start accessing outcomes, rather than assuming a guess will make you succeed, your influence will increase exponentially (even in the unknown).

Its true that successes don't know everything, but they know how to expand and refine what little bits they do know. Its not glamorous, but its worthwhile.

The Need For Stimulation

We find it hard to look outside of our own sphere. We want to reach beyond our "destiny" as it stands with our current limitations. We have no garuntee that our limitation isn't to just be mediocre. So we search for stimulation to disrupt our own limits.

Another need for stimulation is so that others "bring information to us" rather than "taking ourselves to them", this saves energy, and gives leverage. All successful people usually have this working in their favor, and it helps them feel less crazy and gives their idea some confidence.
It will not make their businesses successful, but it will give them a little bit of backup "destiny" wise, and will allow them to focus on what to do rather than "who they might fail to be".

We need a break, we need some people to connect with, and a little bit of immediate feedback. Instant gratification is super rare in the learning process, so we get it from people on a small scale, so that we don't need it when working on the big scale. (where we are the tough guy)

Maintaining your skills and forums in relation to work ethic (and the value you can gain)

To have a good work ethic, and maintain your skills its usually good to have an ongoing project that is open and you are working on here and there every day. If you DO have that, then forums and discussion groups or work partners, can help you just get a few things off your chest and to have a level of decorum in your off time.
You obviously always do biz first before anything else, and during breaks you do other things that are more trivial such as forums, emails, etc.

If you work 5 hours and take an hour break, you might need a break. No shame in it. None at all.

Feeling Overwhelmed and The Next level

Its always overwhelming you just get something to hold on to and move the chains one bit at a time.
Brainstorming is a great excercise, as well as mapping what you have. It is really hard to keep all things you thought about the biz in memory, so just take a notebook with you or keep a file open on your computer and pour out your most useful thoughts and mold them into the best stuff you can. Don't worry, our brains are WIRED to succeed, so you will start actually covering valid points sooner or later and will instinctively create routines that help declutter and improve the process.

Its overwhelming because you don't know what else is out there, but the next level is just the current level, simplified. Its simplification lends the way to improvement in your processes.
IME it took me about six months to go from ZERO to a full business for the first time. It was about 100 pages of my best thoughts simplified, made useful, and then simplified again. There were roughly a few stages I went through.
A copy cat phase, a kind of "ramble as well as I could" phase, a phase where I put up relevant information, a phase where I started considering long term impacts, a phase where I started carving that all up and saying it in one or two lines, a phase where I wanted to do more of that good stuff, and then finally where I was rather hands on in a fully fleged development process.

Once you have that fully done up product and plan in your hands, its like holding gold. And that takes away that overwhelming feeling.

The Action Threshold

You may act early on, but I garuntee the reaction from others is something like "oh, no no, pish posh", which will cause you to think, "how could I have it so wrong".

The Action Threshold is how much INSIGHT you need before you can act and not recieve a completely invalid reply. You need to at least be able to struggle or have "inadequate products and services" before you can really even begin.
And that is pretty horrifying when your ego really doesn't want to be that person with "horrible" products and services.

I don't condone horrible products and inadequate service, I just recognise that you WILL be sorted in this category at some point. As an ambition its pretty low. But as a process, its one of those things, where you get called horrible before you get called good.

If you can manage a response time that is better than no response, you'll start acting. But the really valuable part of acting is IMPROVING your status.
You aren't going to start great otherwise you'll just stop caring and run away, and that bad customer service and fraud, so... In an effort to earnestly improve you will "act" in ways that will encourage your improvement, and this is what you actually need to be able to achieve, before you can cross that action threshold (not perfection, not unless your market TRULY requires it, like there are bridges you might burn etc, or customers will box you as a certain thing forever and you want to not be boxed that way).

Positioning your business is different from inaction though, so you kinda just have to use common sense to differentiate between the two.

The Kinds Of Action (flat, rocky, underappreciated, bursts, consistancy)

You will start off really flat, meaning all your ideas will be the same and heading in the same direction.
Then you'll have small amounts of value, and you'll try to find its key placements.
You will find a key placement but find the response patters out because you aren't moving or doing anything.
You will try some things, and you'll buck and kick and so on.
You'll get a hang of whats going on and design a consistant idea.

No, action isn't a straight shot of "oh wow! I'm flying!!!", "happy thoughts happy thoughts happy...!!!"
Nah, you start off like "so I'm the uninspired one huh!", "we'll see about that" (storms off), "well I found what I was talking about but it wasn't what I thought, I'm still right though!!!" (frowning look of discernment and disappointment), "haha! Look at my power... Wait, oh, thats really lame actually... Damn", "Ok ok ok, I get it, be chill, do my work, address these issues, I got you".

Its a very glamorous evolution as you can see

Actual Business vs the ability to talk the talk (why lips are sealled)

Your actions won't necessarily be your business itself, they won't necessarily be sales, they might actually only be "all in your head". You business should be judged on its "realness" or the fact that what you have right infront of you "has got it!". Talking the talk gets swiftly moved past by those who have that something that "has it".

Try to limit talking the talk, and cultivate whats really going on. Its easy to miss that kind of stuff.
And know that its ok if your business is 99% you sitting around working and the other 1% of the time people say "you never show me anything". It doesn't matter if everything you say or do shines like gold, just so long as back at the work bench, your stuff is pretty good and progressing.

Most guys lips are sealed because they really ARE working on stuff, so just remember that. And know thats ok.

Connecting skills, sales, design, marketting, writing etc and why there are so many guys here that know it better

All those skills are kind of like branches of a company, as a CEO you might need to help them or muster up a magical aid for them, but as a typical biz guy you don't need to directly match people skill for skill.

Its an instinct to be "the best at everything", but all you really need to answer is "can my team and I do it?".
The reason guys know certain things better than you, is because the work load of businesses do at times need to be diversified, and people have specialist backgrounds that help them achieve the same end visions.

Your product isn't inferior if your vision comes into being. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, its just a matter of seeing that and addressing it properly rather than competetively.

The reason most people know different things is because they often did it BEFORE they were an entrepenuer. Guide their aspirations beyond their current skill, and help them achieve great end product. Thats the unified goal.



End:

Agree, disagree, have something to add or tweak or say better? Go ahead.

The learning process is a rough and tumble thing that is often misinterpreted as a straight shot towards X.
I hope I helped some of you get a clearer picture on some of what happens behind the scenes.

I really didn't mean to make it this long. So I gotta go get on stuff.
Just please try to consider other people's learning processes, rather than have an extreme point of view.
I understand that it is all rather stressful, but, its about everyone doing business better, so that we don't have horrible businesses taking pot shots at others in their because they are insecure about the end result.

Stand up, and be responsible. And don't just "tell" people what is "right and wrong".
Respect that these things are tough, and don't belittle others.
I hope that this post has helped you understand, that there exists DEPTH behind the initial walls and that simply throwing stuff at walls does nothing.

We must procure all our measures of success and derive them from good actions if we are to succeed hardily.

All the best,
Rogue

(please defer to the clarifications you can find around here and on the internet on these issues if it confuses you)

 

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[Ravens_Shadow]

Vu ci jupitv, O fofp'v iwip sief vjot. Xjz fup'v zua tvuq neloph 3 qehi muph qutvt epf edvaemmz qav vjev iggusv opvu e getvmepi wipvasi? Og zua qav et nadj iggusv opvu e catopitt et zua fu vjiti sofodamuatmz muph qutvt, zua nohjv hiv tunixjisi.