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In his fantastic book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how multiple studies actually showed that people who are given more information make less accurate decisions.
This is pretty interesting because I think this is what’s holding back a lot of people to achieve what they dream - be it writing a world-classes sales copy or just make money online.
Here’s why.
You see, there’s certainly no shortage of information in the world today. Whatever you’re striving to do, the exact information on how to do it is probably already within your reach. The only problem is you can’t implement it.
I’m not talking about acting on it. I’m talking about correctly processing those information and do what actually matters.
Why Less Is More
Here’s an example Malcolm pointed out in his book:
Doctors in Cook County used to ask patients who come in complaining of chest pain a series of routine questions. Questions such as, have you have had a heart surgery? Do you have diabetes? Do you smoke and so on. Then they perform some routine checks like ECG and blood presuure.
And from all those information, they determine (decide on) whether the patient is having or likely to have a heart attack. If the patient is low-risk, they are sent home because the hospital is situated at a poor area and most people who come in do not have insurance cover. If they patient is assessed as high-risk, they are admitted into the hospital.
The problem is, doctors are only 79% to 85% accurate… despite the wealth of information. Some people who is likely to develop a heart attack in the next 24 hours get sent home while some who are perfectly fine gets admitted in.
So Reilly, the hospital’s Dean of medicine, tried to find a solution to this burgeoning problem. Long story short: He found one - Goldman’s algorithm.
That’s right. A static guideline or formula (developed over many years of refinement) to decide on whether or not a patient is likely to have a heart attack. As it turns out this formula performs better at predicting heart attack, at a whopping 95% (Data collected over 2 years).
The reason? “The algorithm is a rule to protect doctors from being swamped with too much information.“, wrote Malcolm. The algorithm states that all those other factors such as diabetes and family history play such a minor role at determining whether the guy is having heart attack or not right now, it’s better to ignore them.
How does this apply to you?
Now, that’s not the only case he pointed out where more information equals lower-quality decisions. But I shall not go into all of them here.
What I want to address is: How does this apply to you?
Well, are you caught up at all those small factors that play little roles in achieving your dream? Are you wasting your time learning all kinds of junk, worrying about problems well into the future and taking into consideration what you should ignore?
They key to achieving is to identify they key factors and hammer hard on them. Now, I can’t tell you what your key factors are - I don’t even know what’s your dream. But I can almost certainly tell you that you’re making things more complicated than they need to be.
Most people do it. So do I.
Let’s use me as an example. As an internet marketer, there’s a thousand things that distracts me from what I want to achieve. Everything seems “crucial”. There’s web design, there’s blogging, there’s social networking, there’s SEO, there’s product launch, there’s email marketing and so on and so forth.
Each of those things are a huge subject on their own. But none of those matters if I don’t get this right - and this is my key factor - web copywriting. If I can’t sell, then all of those other things are pointless.
Salesmanship is my key factor. What’s yours?
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