Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22131 – 702:
Many of you may remember that this whole streak of making at least one post per day, even if it is just one sentence, started with a blog post I read by a marketing maven named Seth Godin. He had been blogging for 11 years and never missed a post. I took it as a personal challenge even though he has so many people that not only read him but are signed up for his classes and what-not-all that I could not possibly have been a target but yet what he had said resonated in my mind on a deep level.
Back in July, he wrote another post called “The 100 Hour Asset” that has just been similarly stuck in my mind. The whole post is only 169 words by my reckoning and I do suggest you read it if you have a couple of minutes. You don’t have to read it to understand this post though.
His statement was that if you picked any skill and spent 100 hours learning and practicing it, you could have an impressive asset that not everybody has. It could be a physical skill like sharpening tools or something specific in your own line of work or interest like writing Javascript. The point being, that if you can focus on something for that amount of time you can build something. string a few of them together and you have some real assets.
Then, what he said next has stuck in my mind and I’ve tried to ignore it but it keeps popping back up in my mind like a revved-up whack-a-mole game. What if you focused 1,000 hours, 20 hours a week, on learning something. That’s a whole new category entirely. The last sentence of the post says, “Access to knowledge isn’t nearly as difficult as the desire to learn.”
“So what, Herb?” people might say, “It’s a very cool concept, but what’s the matter with you?” I don’t know. This just really has been bugging me. I’ve got writing projects to work on and online classes waiting for me to open them up on Udemy.com (They are all ones I got on sale. If you use Udemy you should always wait for a sale. I have discovered that Seth’s stuff, even on Udemy, never goes on sale.). “What are you talking about?” I don’t have any articulate way to express what I am feeling as I have been thinking about this post but I am going to be making some changes. I will still keep my commitment to posting every day in my blog here but I have more that I can learn and do.
