Shoulders of Giants
I’ve mentioned before that I read Dean Wesley Smith’s blog. For those of you unfamiliar, he’s an author who has written well over a hundred novels for traditional publishers, and has since switched over to self-publishing, starting his own publishing company and throwing out wisdom on a practically daily basis to authors on overcoming the hurdles of what he calls, “The New World Of Publishing.”
On pretty much every project I’ve worked on, I’ve written some article about why now is the best time to be alive for any given subject. Dean Wesley Smith argues that there’s never been a better time to be a writer, and I agree.
On the side of two-pound coins in the UK, there’s the phrase, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.” It comes from an Isaac Newton quote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
There are multiple reasons it’s a great time to be a writer. The biggest one is that you can literally stand on the shoulders of giants. For instance, Dean Wesley Smith: He writes a blog post every single day, and has had a career as an author spanning longer than I’ve been alive. He writes about business, writing, editing and all sorts of things in between.
When I first tried to create a business, I wasted years by trying to figure out my own way to do things. This is an absolutely stupid thing to do, as I found out by failing. If you can find an expert on a topic, then do what they say.
I’ve gotten most of my knowledge on the topics I talk about by getting started doing what someone else says. Even if you find a simple five step list to get into a new subject on a blog somewhere, get started and let the rest fall into place.
Get Started
The sad thing about beginners is that they don’t want to be beginners. Everyone (myself not-just included, but in the past I’ve been the king of this) tries to start at step two or step ten. They want to do the backflip before they can do the easy stretches. They want to figure it out themselves and rely on nobody.
Stupid.
When you start at zero, you don’t know anything. The best first step you can take is to ask someone who knows what they are doing and just do whatever it is they suggest. Don’t let the weasel inside your mind get to you:
- “This guy might not be an expert like he pretends he is!”
- “But Guy A and Guy B disagree – what about that?”
- “Guy A says you should start here… but I can already do something harder so I should ignore him.”
There is no need for this. Get some advice from somebody who knows what they are talking about. A lot of people are blogging and they’ll probably be writing about what you need to know anyway. (Shameless plug: I post every day about writing and online business stuff, and you can find much better ideas than mine to test out.) If they aren’t writing about what they know, then most people will be happy to answer your questions providing you’re not annoying.
How To Ask Questions
Most people are happy to answer good questions from people who genuinely want to learn. A hell of a lot of people are too afraid to ask questions. I’ve luckily never had this problem. If I see a guy on a forum who is an expert in something even remotely interesting, I’ll message him asking about stuff. If I had been born before the internet era, I’d have written to people. There’s nothing wrong with asking questions, providing they’re good questions.
What’s a good question?
Some people say, “There are no stupid questions.” They’re wrong. There are plenty of stupid questions, and asking them is a good way to not get an answer. Big mistakes include:
- Asking questions about simple Google stuff. “Where is London?” is a stupid question.
- Asking questions about opinions. “I heard you don’t like cats. Why would you hate cats?” Don’t do this unless it’s relevant to something.
- Asking questions which a person clearly won’t answer. “How is your sex life with your wife recently?” It’s none of your god-damned business what someone does in their personal life or what they feed their kids or whatever.
- Asking rhetorical or political questions (if the person isn’t a politician of some sort.) “Hey, your writing is great but do you like Trump because he is a fascist and I hate him!?” Don’t care. You won’t get answered. Don’t phrase an opinion as a question.
- Asking monetary questions or legal questions. This one is big on the internet, “How much money do you make online, bro?” It’s stupid. Most people aren’t going to answer this question (outside of a vague and often misleading figure) because a) it changes and b) it’s none of your business and c) it’s a legal question. The tax man sees everything.
- This is the biggest one: Don’t ask questions which are clearly expansive and will take a long time to answer. The other day, I saw a guy who was an expert on some facet of history get abused on a forum because he refused to answer a question about some question with massive geo-political implications that would have taken thousands of words to answer. Don’t ask massively open-ended questions that are going to take days to answer. It’s not fair.
Most of these things come under a basic banner of social awareness, but the general rule is “be reasonable with what you’re expecting of the person you’re asking.” Added to that, demonstrate your thankfulness, and if you can help the person for their time in some way, do that – even if it’s just a token.
Final Thoughts: Going Beyond Asking For Help
Once you’ve asked some questions and you’ve committed to following the advice you get, you’ll find that you start to generate your own answers. This is the part that people want to skip to, but you’ll be in a much better position if you do the previous steps.
You’ll have entered a magical world at this point where few people ever get to, and an added benefit will be that you recognise the people that are stuck not following this advice. They tend to congregate on forums and seem to have an expert opinion on the flaws of every expert despite not actually doing anything themselves.
Don’t join them, take the first steps by asking questions and actually getting your feet wet.
P.S. Long term commenter on this site and niche site challenger James from Red Pill Reviews has arranged a free website critique service which I’ll be helping with. Drop in on his site and read this article about it and then if you’d like a website review, we’ll do that for you.