Learning vs. Doing

Coming up for today's topic took me longer than for any post I wrote so far. I think it's because I'm not sharpening my axe.

Each company, product, or blog that becomes successful solves a problem. It's not important how big or small this problem is, or how many people have it. What matters is that enough people want to have your solution and are happy to pay for it. If you want to build a company for the sweet, sweet 4HWW lifestyle, you're setting yourself up for failure. If you're just looking at what's fun, you're as well. Building something successful lives at the intersection at what you are good at and what other people want. To increase this intersection you need to work on two things: Learning and Doing.

Learning means to increase your problem solving skills. Find a project or a skill you like and expand your knowledge about it. Don't think about anything but what you find interesting. Challenge yourself. Learn something that's rare and useful. If it's both of these things it will also be valuable.

Doing means to take the skills you already know and use them to help somebody else. This requires you to think about which problem you want to solve, who the audience that cares about this problem is and how you can reach them. It isn't about learning new skills, but reapplying what you already know.

Both aspects are important. I'm not working on either of them. Right now, the only work I'm doing for my blog is to write the one post per day. It isn't about learning something new. I'm also not thinking about who might care about what I'm writing. All I'm doing is to write a post so my habit tracker doesn't complain.

Daily writing can be a catalyst, an amplifier. But there isn't anything I'm working towards, nothing that can be amplified. And so I'm just typing away, each day anew, without a goal in mind.