Bramley Famli

One of the challenges the internet has created is an unthinkable number of channels through which to broadcast. Of course none of us make use of every channel, but there is always someone using a channel we’re not. And so if you want to communicate to them the days of taking the attitude of ‘you just come to us’ is over. Chances are, because they’re not engaging with your channel is that they don’t even know about you. And so if you want to find them, you’ve got to insert yourself into their space. It doesn’t end there, because each channel requires a different format for your content. You don’t just write an article or record a podcast and hope it translates easily into each space. No! You’ve got to take whatever you start with and continually adjust it to whatever context you’re going to post it to.

And if you’re like me, then you’ve got a headache just thinking about the ‘how’ of taking your message to as many platforms as possible. What I have learned is that the ability to do this is getting easier and easier (in terms of tools available), and the more I learn about new channels the more competent I feel and become in my distribution efforts.

With that as a pre-amble, let me tell you about my latest adventure….

I took the e-zine article (Five Practical Steps to Retain Talent) that I produce for TomorrowToday each month (it gets sent to around 11 000 people via e-mail), posted it onto our blog, built a short presentation and built a video PodCast. The video file was then uploaded to iTunes and YouTube.

I don’t know if this sounds like a lot to you? It exhausted me. Took me 1.5 days to work it all out, learn new skills and get it all to a place I was reasonably happy with. Of course next time around it’ll take far less time and in my experience always better quality.

Here’s the video below from YouTube.

My coleague Graeme Codrington sent me a mail link via Twitter today that discusses the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. It’s a nice punchy overview of the 5-steps towards being an expert (starting as a novice) Well worth the read.

By looking at the five levels from a higher altitude, we can distill some common themes that emerge as one progresses from novice to expert:

• Moving away from relying on rules and explicit knowledge to intuition and pattern matching.
• Better filtering, where problems are no longer a big collection of data but a complete and unique whole where some bits are much more relevant than others.
• Moving from being a detached observer of the problem to an involved part of the system itself, accepting responsibility for results, not just for carrying out tasks.

As I read it, it reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, where one of his chapters is dedicated to the concept of putting in 10 000 hours in order to be a world expert at something. It’s not 10 000 hours doing the same thing. I imagine that simply makes you an expert at monotony. It’s 10 000 hours of growth, development, stretch, etc, etc. 10 000 hours roughly translates to 4 hours every day, 5 days per week for 10 years. When you think, expecially, of sports champions, it does give some insight and perspective to the sort of investment they’re put in to get them where they are today.

I managed to get the PodCast of Gladwell being interviewed on 702. Follow this link to listen to the 10 000 hours exert.