Build Your Island.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about building your island.

There's a vast catalog of information to be known, considered, and learned in this world. Wikipedia alone boasts over 30,739,187 pages covering a multitude of topics. Let's imagine you decided to make a career out of reading every page on Wikipedia. Spending just ten minutes on each page, reading eight hours a day, five days a week, it would take you five thousand, five hundred and sixty-eight years to read everything. This assumes you retain all knowledge with 100% comprehension and that no new pages are added after today. Given these considerations, it's clear that knowledge is indeed a vast, seemingly bottomless ocean.

To simplify, let's focus on one area of knowledge. What's your topic?

Mine is marketing. My entire career, all twenty years of it, has been dedicated to marketing. I practice marketing daily, tweet and write about it, participate actively in the marketing community, and sit on the International board for the American Marketing Association. Despite investing about forty-two thousand hours into marketing, there's still much more to learn. The humbling truth is, the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know.

While I may not know everything about marketing, I have mastered the fundamentals. I learned the basics two decades ago while trying to keep my head above water in this vast ocean of knowledge. Applying these fundamentals provided a life preserver, allowing me to stop floundering. After the first ten thousand hours of practicing the fundamentals, I had built a solid foundation. My knowledge has formed an island, a stable career where I continue to learn and expand my platform.

I think this closely aligns with today's fortune, which states, "In the ocean of knowledge, only those who want to learn will see the land." But what do I know?