Jeff Hoffman, an award-winning global entrepreneur, self-made millionaire, and founder of many hugely successful startups, calls himself a sponge. And what does he scoop up? Well, information!
What Jeff does (and that's how he became so successful) is a process informally called "information sponging". Info sponging is a learning mindset. It means that you tell yourself -
"I'm going to learn something totally new everyday. I am not going to master it, just learn something small about an industry I have no idea about. Learn something every single day that that has nothing to do with the business that I'm in. And then every day what I'm going to do after I learn, I'm going to take a three by five card and just write down the summary of what I just learned and throw it into a shoe box."
Soon, you'll have shoe-box full of unrelated info cards. Great. What now?
At the end of the month, you're going to take some time to look through every single card that you put in for that month. See what you can learn from the whole of it? And then see if somehow you can relate that to your business. Somehow if you can relate that to your life, your job, your investments, you hobbies, your relationships, etc.
Go through every major thing that you do in your life, and see if this new information that you gained - if it can somehow be applied to any of it.
What's the point of this, you ask? Well, here's how it changed Jeff's life:
Jeff read an article years ago about how bananas are cheaper the closer that they get to going bad, because obviously the grocery store wants to make sure they can at least get some money from it. And they know that the closer they are to going bad, the less likely someone is to actually buy it.
So, Jeff had just gotten into the airline industry at the time, and he went "I wonder if airline flights become cheaper when they're closer to taking off, if the plane has a lot of empty seats".
And so what did he do? Because he was already in the airline industry, he started meeting with Delta. He started meeting with America. He started meeting with United and realised that all of these companies had seats that they had never sold.
He told them, "Hey, if I could sell those seats for you, but you just happen to make a little bit less, would that be good for your bottom line?"
"Yeah, absolutely. Because at least we're making some money."
So what happened? Well, Priceline.com happened. Here you could actually bid on flight prices and the airline would either accept or reject your offer. It was insanely successful because it was good for both the passenger and the airline!
He built a multi-billion-dollar company because of this thing called info-sponging.
Once again, think about this.
He's in the airline industry and he's reading about freaking bananas. And that idea gave him a multibillion dollar idea. And that was not the last of it. Through out his career, he made numerous such leaps. He continues with this "shoe-box info-sponging" process even today, and swears by it.
An hour a day of being curious, that's all it takes to get really good at anything you do.
So, what are you going to learn today?
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