real/brilliant: How To Stay Relevant

I have a lot of sticky notes in my office, with notes on things I see online and in books, usually things I’m trying to remember to tell my clients that’s relevant to their project. How do I come up with all these notes?

I read. Widely.

I read everything. I think that as a consultant one must read widely, and probably should read more than anyone else they know. Why? Is it really that important?

Well, I’m a Type A (born on Martha Stewart’s birthday; truly, I’m cursed) and so I like to accomplish a lot. However, one of the failings I see with folks is that they walk around as if they are in a fog. I get a lot of dead-end questions from readers, “What is a Kindle? What’s the difference between a Kindle 1 and Kindle 2?” and I wonder, do they not understand that their job is to find the information? Their job isn’t to ask me for the information. You know? They should go look it up and find out? Hello, Google!

If I want to know about something, I don’t just go around asking dumb questions on blogs or Twitter, I find it out. If I can’t find it out, then I ask, but I feel bad about that. If I can’t find something, then there must be a screw loose in my head or in Google’s search engine, cuz I can find anything. Seriously.

So, today, if you’re sitting down to work on a piece of writing for your company or for a client and you wonder if you have anything to say that matters or is relevant, you need to go to Google. Just type in your subject and check the news and you’ll find every news story filed in the past hour and back to years ago. You’ll find links from those articles to other articles. Pretty soon, after like twenty minutes, you’ll know what’s relevant. It’s not hard, just takes a bit longer than posting an inane question on Twitter or on Facebook.

Try my approach; you’ll look smarter.

Tagged as: read widely, real/brilliant, Social Media, success