True Understanding.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about how to gain true understanding.

One movie I really enjoyed watching was "School of Rock," starring Jack Black. In one scene, he was having lunch with his fellow teachers when he gave a classic Woody Allen line that goes something like this: "Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym."

Although everyone you meet can teach you something you didn't know that you didn't know, you could never learn and understand it in quite the same way they did. One major reason for the differences in learning is the continuous advancements in technology. Unless you freeze time and refuse new technologies like the Amish have done to preserve their way of life, it is nearly impossible to learn a skill the same way a teacher or mentor may have learned it.

When I was learning graphic design and typography in college, I had to create most of my fonts by hand with pen and ink. Everything in an advertisement was painstakingly pasted onto boards, photographed for production, touched up again by hand, and then converted to plates for the printing press. Later, I worked at a pre-press shop where all the text was completely managed and laid out on computers, and then outputted directly to film through expensive Linotronic "imagesetter" machines. Today, all of this can be done on a laptop and printed at home.

What then could a student learn from my antiquated experience?

When the web browser was first invented, and I learned HTML, there were not much more than a dozen tags one could use to mark up a page. Today, I couldn't tell you how many tags and commands can be used to build, manage, and display a website. When we were first able to display images, I became an expert at reducing the number of colors indexed in a single CompuServe GIF in order to reduce load time. Today, we are playing full-length feature films on Netflix, sharing desktops on Webex, conducting all aspects of business on our mobile devices, and bandwidth seems to be unlimited.

What then could a student understand from my web pioneer days?

In the world of marketing, and nearly every industry for that matter, there is little benefit in learning the process of the day because before you've mastered the tactics, the technology will have advanced beyond your training. Nearly everything I've learned in my career, I've learned by doing. If there were one thing I could teach a student, it would not be how to do, but rather how to learn. Jump in there and get your hands dirty, because it is as today's fortune says, "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."