Speculation Sucks

Most kids are pretty picky eaters. But most of their biases against foods are unfounded.

Based on speculation.

Take carrots for example.

They say they don't like carots.

You ask them why not.

They say carrots are orange and icky.

Plus they just know if they do or don't like something. (these are very articulate children)

You, being the older and more-seasoned eater, ask them kindly to try just one.

Pretty please?

Tentatively the child takes a bite of the carrot. Then another bite, then another.

Because carrots taste pretty good in reality.

And it turns out that the kid didn't know simply because they didn't try it. A similar occurrence happened to me this year.

I took a community college course on economics.

For a long time I was frightened anything that had to do with numbers and hated anything that had to do with it. I loathed math most of all. And that's one of the reason I stayed away from marketing programs. I'd see the calculus requirement, the econ requirement, the stats requirement and run for the hills. That was the exact opposite of what I should have done.

Now I still don't really like numbers, to be quite honest I'm still pretty shit with them, but I'm no longer afraid of them. I attribute a lot of that to this course that I've been putting off for so long. Once I got the basic concepts (my first few quizzes were ugly) I realized that concepts in economics applied to every part of life. Law of diminishing returns can be applied to more than just production, understanding product elasticity can be applied to markteting. It's really pretty cool stuff.

One of the things I love is learning something that applies to one aspect of life then applying it to something else. It's what helps me better understand what to do when I'm selling a product. And a main part of marketing is just learning what you didn't know before. So if you're like me and are afraid to take a course or do something based on speculation, but haven't ever tried it before take the plunge.

You may find the next thing to influence the campaign that helps you make it big. And if you don't at least you learned something.