When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get out of school. I didn’t dislike education, but I just felt that I should be doing things rather than learning about things; I was anxious to put my limited knowledge to use. However, now that I’m older, I understand that in order to be successful, I need to continue to learn and educate myself. Doing things is great, but it’s even better to do them the right way. You probably know what I’m talking about. I mean, here you are spending your spare time reading a marketing blog (thank you for visiting, by the way). In order to successfully learn, you need to understand the process, and find out how you can move on to the next phase as efficiently as possible. I’ll attempt to outline this process below…

1. Unconscious Incompetence: Basically, you don’t know what you don’t know. In this phase, you are doing things, and failing, but you don’t understand why. You don’t know what you’re problem is, and therefore have no idea how to fix it. Let’s use hitting in baseball as an example. You really want to hit the ball, but keep missing, and you have no idea why.

2. Conscious Incompetence: In this phase you know what you need to get better at, but still can’t manage to do it properly. Looking at our baseball example, you’ve hired a trainer, you’re reading some books, and you’ve identified why you can’t hit the ball. You’re working to correct the problem, and have some limited success, but you fail more often than you succeed. This is where practice comes in handy.

3. Conscious Competence: In this step you can succeed, but have to focus hard. When you step up to the plate, you have to think about it and make sure that you’re stance is perfect, you make sure to keep your eye on the ball, that you have proper follow-up, etc. It’s like a checklist in your mind. You have to manually check things off, and focus on doing things the proper way. You can be successful, but it’s not easy.

4. Unconscious Competence: This is where we all want to be. In the final phase, you are successful and don’t even have to think about it. You instinctively know where to put your feet, you know how to swing, and you keep your eye on the ball with no problem. This enables you to think about other aspects of the game (where you want to hit the ball, how to effectively move that base runner over, focus on specific pitches, etc). In order to get to this point, you need to understand what mistakes you were making before, understand how to correct those mistakes, and then practice.

So what does this have to do with marketing? Everything. We are living in an age where new technology and new techniques are being created daily. Customer mindsets are changing, the tools we use are changing, the rules themselves are changing. Learning is crucial to your success as a marketer. Don’t get frustrated because you fail. Push through those hard times and find out what you are failing at, and why. Then learn how to correct the problem, and focus hard on what you need to do. Before long, you will be able to move on to other aspects of business, and then others, becoming an expert and building on your knowledge.

Agree / Disagree? Let me know in the comments.