It’s everywhere. Pages and pages of information about almost anything you can imagine. If you want to learn about different species of frogs, there’s hundreds of pages about that. If you search for ‘ways to optimize your blog’ there’s pages about that.
So what information should you focus your time and energy on? What should you actually read? It can be confusing and sometimes a little annoying when you enter a new field full of ideas and potential only to feel massively overwhelmed by the mass of information and websites about your topic.
This happens to a lot of people, and it’s certainly happened to me. You don’t know what you should be reading, what podcast to listen to, what people you should be networking with. It’s a mystery and without a direction or plan you’ll end up lost, so what should you do?
Is there simply too much information on the internet?
It has been said that it would take one person billions of years to read/understand and see everything there is on the internet. It’s just so vast that to consider trying to learn it all is not realistic. So what should you do?
Start with what you know. Begin with what you want to do; and we’re talking about your life goals and what you want to improve. If you are a guitarist, we’re talking about which skills you should work on first.. If you’re a martial artist, we’re talking about what techniques you should practice. We’re focusing on trying to work out WHAT you should spend your time on when browsing the internet.
1) Establish what you’re doing. Your most basic ‘area of interest’. This needs to be definite, it’s no good saying ‘I want to be a blogger’ you need a plan and an idea of what niche you’re going into. You can’t blog about everything, Unless you’re awesome and have a large team to compile content, like Mashable, Distractify, or ViralNova.
2) Pick ONE area to improve. This is the crucial step and it will make the difference between improving and just bouncing between lots of different ideas and never really getting anything done. Pick one area to improve, then work on that. Don’t deviate and start something else.
Although it’s good to have more than one string to your bow, it’s not good to take this to the extreme and start hundreds of projects, without ever actually finishing any of them. Being a ‘project butterfly’ is going to hold you back in the long run.. You need to be able to start something and finish it, then when you’ve got good at doing that you can move onto doing more than one thing at the same time.
So what does this look like in the real world?
Okay, so the internet has too much information in it, and we don’t have the time to consume it all. Pick something and finish it.. Then what? Well let’s look at an example and see what would happen. Let’s look at ‘Adam’.
Adam wants to become a better blogger. He wants to achieve success in this area and knows it’s all about hard work and focus, so what should he focus on? He should focus on doing one thing properly and then and only then should he move onto doing other things. He shouldn’t start promoting his Facebook page before he’s got any content or customers, because what are the new FB fans going to have to look at?
Try to pick out what’s useful
Normally when doing an internet search you can sort out what is useful for what’s not in a few minutes. Don’t spend much time reading forums and subjective opinions, instead look to solid sources of information that are more likely to be accurate. Specially if you’re learning how to code HTML for example, don’t rely on a forum.. Instead look to the professional websites and people who offer that service.
Spending time on Facebook and on sites which offer nothing but distraction and ‘trending topics’ is going to waste your time and make sure you don’t succeed. Try and learn to tell the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sources of information.
Good luck with the venture, and if it goes well and you’re able to use what I’ve shared in this post, let me know by contacting me or sharing this post on Facebook or something like that.