domestic squabbles

Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes

The other day my girlfriend saw me reading a book she’d seen
me reading before.

She was puzzled. “Why are you reading the same books over
and over again?” she said.

“To learn this stuff better,” I said.

Well, that didn’t make sense to her. “You mean you didn’t
understand it the first time?”

“It’s not that, dear. This is mastery-level advertising
and persuasion stuff… You don’t just get it by going
through it once,”

“Well, you must have bad reading retention. I never
read a book more than once. I don’t have time to do that,”

Now I’m starting to feel like she doesn’t understand me at
all, because I think I’m pretty clever to be learning this
stuff so intently and she’s basically implying that any
normal person reads a book and moves – so I try to be
clever and challenge her, “Do you mean to tell me that
when you read a book you get all the information out of it
and then you never have to look at it again? Is that how
you learn?” I said.

“No! I’m more of a hands-on learner anyway,” she said…
effectively heading me off at the pass – because we are
all hands-on learners.

She deflected what I was implying – mainly that
it’s incredibly arrogant for most of us to think we can absorb
a great book in one reading. I’m not talking about fiction
or any book you read in the bathroom either, I’m talking
about business and marketing books written by people with
years of experience in the trenches of advertising.

I’m a hands-on leaner too. The problem of saying ,”I’m
a hands on learner. I learn when somebody shows me,”
is that when you say that you are also telling world that
you expect a teacher to show up or you’ll just sit on your
ass and not learn anything.

For fans of “the Secret” and other “law of attraction” stuff
this is valuable. If you sit around waiting for “hands-on”
teachers to show up you’ll probably mostly get sweaty
guys in dirty tank tops showing you how to flip burgers
or dig ditches… Because it’s in the manual labor trades
where “hands-on” learners end up being “hands-on” teachers.

Saying, “I’m a hands on learner,” is counterproductive to
your success because it’s a self-imposed limitation.

Here’s an example:

I had a cabinet-making business before I got into doing
marketing… in fact I got into marketing in order to sell
my cabinetry. I did most of the work myself but sometimes
the jobs were big and I needed help with the heavy lifting
and sanding and things. I hired guys from time to time…

Now I had this pleasant fellow working for me on one
job and he was very excited about what we were doing –
thrilled with the idea of learning a skilled trade like
woodworking.

“I read every woodworking book I could get my hands on,” I told
him, “a lot of my skills are things that I read about and
I studied the advice of the authors of the books and magazine
articles.” Then I showed him the 60-odd books I had
in my woodworking library and suggested he borrow a
couple so he could learn about the trade.

“I’m not really into reading,” he said,” I like to learn
by having people show me how to do things.”

That was it. He was only interested in learning what little
I would show him as we went along. Now I had a lot
to teach, but his apparatus for learning was very limited…
And it was going to hold him back from learning
the skills he would need to earn a decent wage at the
business.

Now I am not suggesting that we don’t all learn from experience.

That’s not the case, obviously. We all learn a lot of
our most practical skills from experience, getting
our own wisdom and sense of what works and what
doesn’t work along the way.

_____________________________________________

Ok. We are all hands-on learners. That’s a big part of how
learning happens.

But if YOU want to succeed in your own home-based business
using the internet – are you going to find somebody to teach
you everything one-on-one?

Are you going to spend 7 years apprenticing in an advertising
agency to learn about marketing? Work your way up from
the mail-room to the boardroom?

Are you going to quit your job and go to work as an assistant
for some internet guru for less mon.ey?

No. You aren’t . And you don’t need to.

What you need to do to succeed in this industry is self-educate
yourself.

That means reading.

Books. Some of them more than once.

Like this one by Napoleon Hill:

http://zerodollarmarketer.com/fantasos/16qa/order

It’s fr~ee.

Do read it.

Stay Frosty,

Loren Woirhaye

P.S. Oh yeah – looking for a turn-key, plug-in and go opportunity
you can use to make $1000s a week almost immediately?

It’s at http://jaguar-ms.comm

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.