Blogs are a blessing because I have learned a lot of valuable information from several free blogs out there. These sites have helped me out with more information than I could possibly describe. The problem is, when you are new and just learning a skill set, too much information can be paralyzing.
I was in a PhD program for a while - actually wrote half of my dissertation before I changed courses and decided to pursue other interests. Anyway, the program was in Counselor Education and Supervision. I learned a tremendous amount about the psychology of an internship and how people best learn, but I tend to forget it often myself. The interesting point I want to bring up from that education is that newbies do not learn best from experts or gurus. The problem is that by the time you are an expert or a guru, so many things have become intuitive or automatic to you that you don't even think of explaining them to a brand new apprentice. And often the apprentice is too new to even know what questions to ask to get that information from you. Newbies actually learn best from novice, novices learn best from those that are at an intermediate level, and so on. It is always that one-up level that provides the best mentor match.
So that brings be to why spending so much time reading other people's blogs is a distraction in creating my own passive income opportunity. First, its difficult without spending hours and hours of research to tell whether someone who speaks with a voice of authority actually knows what the hell they are talking about. People even off of the internet have strong convictions and many can even argue their point well, but that doesn't mean that their information is actually correct. Second, because of number one it becomes much easier to gravitate to the guru's blogs than to those intermediate folks who would provide a better level of tutoring and mentoring for me. When you are first beginning anything, almost everyone pretty much needs a concrete set of rules to follow - it doesn't matter whether its plumbing, counseling, nursing, or internet marketing. This is a UNIVERSAL developmental stage. Gurus can have a difficult time giving you a concrete set of steps and often will contradict themselves. This doesn't mean they are wrong, but there is a completely different thought process that happens psychologically speaking in the novice versus the expert.
Once you follow a set pattern and become accustomed to it as well as have many mistakes under your belt, then you become more effective and can creatively adopt your own procedure. Unfortunately there aren't many ways to speed up this process other than dialoguing regularly with a mentor. In counseling, we call this clinical supervision and it happens weekly for a minimum of one hour for two years in grad school and usually at least two years prior to reaching your full licensure. The other thing that is tricky is that the internet is constantly expanding and the rules keep changing daily, unlike counseling where if you stick to learning a tried and true method, it will work even if there are newer methods available.
So I spend valuable hours of my day in forums and on blogs and don't get nearly the amount of things done that I could if I had more organized supervision like when I was getting licensed as a counselor and as a supervisor. These distractions limit the amount of mistakes that I make, slowing down the rate of learning. I have gotten better, and have found a system of mentoring in The Keyword Academy that I believe will work for me. Court and Mark's instructions are very step-by-step in their videos, even if sometimes in talking they contradict themselves (at least Court seems to be more of the level of an Expert than a true intermediate teacher), but its the best alternative I have found so far. Now I just need to stop reading everyone else's blogs for a while until I have more time!
