A different way to look at information acquisition and how to become world-class

Information is cheap and easily available today. How do we live with this fact and leverage it.

Hey friends,

I’m writing this substack on a gloomy Saturday morning in Zurich International Airport after an 11.5 hour flight from Bangkok. My eyes are burning from the lack of sleep and my back is killing me. I’ve got one flight left on this long journey from Chiang Mai to Barcelona.

The actual moving from place to place is the unsexy side of the digital nomad lifestyle. I’ve taken 12 flights in the last year and spent almost a week either sitting on airplanes or in airports.

Earlier this morning, as I was sipping my overpriced americano, I couldn’t help think of the contrast between the positive and negative aspects of the digital nomad lifestyle.

What I find very interesting is whenever I mention I’m a digital nomad on a business call, I’m almost always met with a big smile and a few sentences showing curiosity, jealousy or admiration. Funny enough the loneliness, anxiety of deciding where to head to next, the hours sitting on airbnb and Google flights looking for affordable deals, and navigating the numerous visa constraints and nuances never comes up on the call.

I get it. The average person hasn’t experienced the lifestyle so they only have a surface-level understand of what it means to live as a digital nomad.

Any all-encompassing lifestyle is similar to a complex, multi-variant discipline or process like building a skyscrapper, or sending a rocket into space in that they have multiple layers of information.

There’s information which is obvious and easily accessible. I’m not an architect or engineer but I could probably list a hundred things that go into building a skyscrapper, from the need for piping and electrical wiring, to meeting safety codes, and laying a solid foundation.

As human beings we constantly pick up surface-level information on a wide range of subjects but its the layers underneath where the gold lies.

Most people forget information is layered

I recently wrote a post about a big mistake I made in my business. A few months ago I pivoted out of a market I had been operating in for years.

By doing this I gave up all the leverage I had built up focusing on that market. I had spent years “digging through the information layers” only to move back to a market I had left years earlier.

Since my team and I at my agency, projectBI, had spent a few years working with large DTC brands, we had come across dozens of obsticals that were specific to the services we were providing. Most of these obsticals only became obvious by “staying in the game” and continuing to push ourselves.

By continuing to operate in our little niche (custom BI solutions for 8 and 9-figure DTC brands), we ended up picking up knowledge and skills which were far deeper than the “clear and obvious information”. We had put in the time and learned this information by playing “our game”. This put us in a new category, experts.

An expert is simply someone who has gained “expert-level learned information”. This takes years of focus and hard work.

The expert becomes world-class by simply outlasting everyone else. A positive attitude and growth mindset also help.

When to go deep vs. wide

As entrepreneurs we have no choice but to hear a lot of hats and be knowledgable in a lot of areas.

I do believe though that an entrepreneur can only go so deep in so many areas, and that its best to use experts where possible.

A good example is taxes.

When I set up my US-based businesses I had little to know knowledge of US tax law. I picked up the basics but the basics aren’t enough when it comes to the IRS.

I learnt the hardway that trying to cover too many areas without having true experts to learn from and leverage is a big mistake.

When it comes to the core service offering / competency of the business, the entrepreneur needs to go as deep as possible. The deeper the better because there are only so many players in the expert level and by definition, only a small number who are truly world-class.

Another way to frame this concept is that the longer you stay in the game the more learned knowledge you pick up which turns you into an expert, and its the experts who make the outsized returns.

Anyway friends, I hope this post got you thinking a bit differently about knowledge acquisition and how to grow into a world-class operator.

Enjoy your weekend.

Justin