Luckily for me and a fellow classmate, Sheldon, the demand for statistics tutoring was at an all time high. The two of us were in incredibly high demand and we fortunately made a lot of pocket cash during college.

The greatest benefit of teaching and writing about statistics at that time was that I really got to learn the subject. While studying and taking tests was valuable, it didn’t lock into my brain until I began teaching.

Since those days in college I’ve noticed that my understanding of subject matters are always heightened if I actually write about the subject. It is for this reason I suggest you do the same.

Here’s my advice on how to learn through publishing (NOTE: My suggestions are very focused on taking notes at conferences and events):

Taking notes is not enough

So often I see people taking notes at a conference and it appears to be just busy work. Many people feel that if they’re not taking notes, they’re not actually doing anything. The problem is we rarely take the time to look through our notes and make sense of the information. While the act of writing something down helps in the memorization process, it isn’t until you review that content, organize it in your own thoughts, and then regurgitate it with your own spin that it becomes a part of what you truly understand.

Don’t just submit a summary report for the office

If you’re sent to a conference by your company, you’re often required to come back and report on your findings. Why people treat this as some sort of top secret mission, I don’t understand. All the content at the conference (except for private conversations) is public information. There’s no reason your report should be isolated to just your company. Anything you write for your office that doesn’t have specific private mentions of what your company is doing should be made public as a published blog post or other type of media (e.g., podcast).

Publishing helps you organize the data collection process

If you know you’re going to be writing some content from a conference or some other event, you will (if you’re smart about it) collect the information in a logical way. When you’re done collecting the content, you want it to help you with the writing of your final product. For example, you might write a summary post of the highlights of the event. In such a case, you’ll start to note the best stuff at the event as you’re collecting information. BTW, you don’t learn this overnight. It takes a while to start to understand how to efficiently collect information for production.

Challenge the status quo

Often you will hear information at an event that doesn’t settle with you, or doesn’t make complete sense. Don’t assume it’s gospel because the keynote speaker, who got paid $10K, said it. Challenge the claims. Engage in debate. Ask a question during or after the session. Write about it on your blog and send the speaker a link to your article asking him or her to weigh in.

Attract like-minded people

By putting a post out on a certain subject you have announced to the world that this is an area of interest to you. The act of reading your article qualifies you as someone who is also interested in this type of content. Publishing is essentially an excellent “interest” matchmaker.

Ask your audience questions

It’s one think to attract like-minded people, but to actually know who they are and learn from them, you need to ask questions. Go for more introspective questions beyond stating your idea and then saying, “What do you think?” which unfortunately comes off as “What do you think of my brilliant idea?” If they agree with you, they won’t bother. If they don’t agree with you they’ll also not bother, as they probably don’t want to waste their time engaging with you. Instead, show some humility and admit you don’t have all the answers. Say that you’re truly looking for input on said issue and you’re hoping others can offer up some experiential examples.

With that said, I’ll ask you the reader, how do you best learn from others? Does the act of publishing help you, and if so do you have any specific techniques that help you learn better? If not publishing, what other methods do you use?

Creative Commons photo credits to kpwerker, MissChatter, thebrandery.

If Google first asked permission, nothing would actually get done. Just think of the simple process you run into where you send out a question to five people via email and you say, “Hey, could I get your response to this?” And then they don’t respond. So then you have to follow up again with them, this time pushing them, “Hey, I really need your response on this.” With all your pushing, you get four people to respond, but there’s always that one person that doesn’t respond and you have to call them. And when you finally get them on the phone you get some excuse, “I’m so sorry I didn’t respond to you, I’ve been really busy. Sure, I can give you a response.” And then in less than 15 seconds, he gives you the answer.

That’s just a story with five people. Imagine thousands or even millions. It’s simply not possible. So the answer Google goes with, “Let’s just do our next project, take the content we want, and let them complain about it afterwards” or more appropriately, “Let’s just do it, everyone will see the enormous value that they won’t care that we didn’t ask for permission first, and for those who do care, we can remove things after the fact.”

It’s a lot easier to operate like Google and like many other similar companies. Simply take the content without permission, and wait until you receive that cease and desist order. If you deal with the consequences after the fact, it’s an unknown quantity that may or may not be costly. The alternative method, ask permission first, is a well known and expensive option.

Is this the new model of publishing and content online? Just go ahead and do it and deal with the fallout afterwards? Look at Napster. That’s how they built their model. Sure it was a completely illegal platform, but they built a brand on it and people wanted that brand.

Google didn’t ask permission to search your site, but why would they?

Not many people realize this but Google Search operates under the same “do first, deal with consequences later” principle. Google indexes your site and the entire web and they do it all without first asking our permission. If you want, you can set up a robots.txt file to alert Google’s web spiders to pass over your site. Very few people know about this, nor do they employ it, because who wants to be invisible to Google? It would be like wanting to take your company’s name out of the phone book.

That’s kind of a dated analogy (“be like taking your name out of the phone book”) since almost nobody uses a phonebook anymore to find phone numbers. We all rely on Google. So go ahead phone company, take my name out of your book, but Google, please keep me in.