It starts with attitude, data can only take you so far

Having the right attitude is the beginning to any fruitful endeavor. From doing the dishes, to launching a multi-million dollar business. If you don’t have a positive can-do attitude going into it, how can you expect to get anything positive out of it?

All the tools, consultants, and data analyses in the world aren’t going to help you if you don’t even believe in what you’re doing. But if you do believe in what you’re doing, and you have a positive can-do attitude, you can be sure that you will find a way. When challenges arise you will naturally be on the lookout for solutions.

Without a can-do attitude challenges look far more like walls than doors. Many smart people who believe they have a can-do attitude may actually be living with a can’t-do attitude. When they can’t find a clear road in front of them they search for one, instead of blazing their own.

Many smart people find themselves constantly analyzing data, finding the right tools, and looking for the perfect road to take. Unfortunately these same people aren’t making much if any headway. They are in what we have come to call “analysis paralysis”. Too scared to make a mistake, they opt instead to search for the “perfect” way to do something.

In today’s heavily recorded world, this “analysis paralysis” sometimes takes the guise of data analysis. Constantly searching for the perfect answer to their questions, a smart person feels very productive poring over data, trying to craft the perfect product, headline, or tweet. Basing every decision they make off of data, they nearly become slaves to it. When they cannot find their perfect answers, they become seductively paralyzed, always searching.

Why not give something fresh a try? Take a chance, I promise the internet won’t bite too hard.

There is an aspect of data that many people seem to overlook. Even the most detailed and well structured data has an inherent flaw built in. Data is and always will be a part of the past. Make all the projections you want, but data will still be representing the past. Not the present, and definitely not the future.

Now, I don’t want to downplay the importance of data and how incredible of a tool it can be. Industries have been built, and rebuilt on the back of data analysis. Obviously data has value, and used properly it can lead to amazing results. My only point is just this: Data is a tool, not the entire solution.

We live in a world that moves so fast that the present is where much of the action happens. Snapchat anyone? Sure, you can use data such as Google’s keywords to see what keywords people have searched for in the past, but Google can’t tell you for certain what people will be searching for tomorrow, or next week.

For these answers we must sometimes lift our heads from the data, and look directly to the people in the world. Social media is likely the most current and open place we have to see what people are talking about and what topics people care about.

Good old fashioned face to face conversations work pretty well too.