“You learn something new everyday.” How many times have you heard or uttered that sentence?

It’s true. I think we can’t help but learn something new every single day, but what about learning on purpose?

The Internet is full of so many resources to learn from. You can find teleseminars, ebooks, ecourses, articles, white papers and newsletters on any topic under the sun. It can be overwhelming for information junkies like myself when there’s new knowledge coming at you from every direction. I get emails daily announcing another course I should consider or a blog post I should read.

One of my favorite things about Twitter is that I can choose to “follow” the people I want to learn from. All of the experts I admire are right there, leading me to the articles they’re reading so I can learn right along with them. There’s always someone sharing a motivational quote, a great time-saving recipe or some hot industry news that helps keep me in the loop.

One of the most powerful things I’ve taken from Twitter over the past few weeks was a ‘Tweet’ from someone known in the Twitterverse as @unmarketing. It’s funny to think that in 140 characters (which is the maximum amount of space allowed in your mini blog post) someone could share something that would have an impact on my life, but it happened.

His tweet simply said something along the lines of: ‘Before you buy another ebook or course, implement something you already have.’ That’s not an exact quote, and I’m not really prepared to go through his 12,000-ish updates to find exactly what he said – it’s the overall point he made that’s important.

I can’t tell you how many ebooks I’ve bought over the years, but I can tell you how many I’ve read. Two. They were really good. I skimmed the others, but they’re all on a thumb drive waiting for me to find the time to go through them.

It’s ridiculous to keep buying and downloading these things without ever taking the advice inside and applying it to my business.

@unmarketing (Scott Stratten is his real name) inspired me to dust off a copywriting course I purchased a couple months ago and open it up. Until that day, I had consistently been marking off time in my calendar to get to the course, but it always got trumped by work or surfing for new information. I have stacks of books I’ve yet to read yet I continue to buy new ones while the others sit there waiting for their spines to be cracked.

What about you? Are you hording information and stockpiling ebooks without actually implementing anything? I challenge you to take a break from downloading anything new until you put something you already have into practice.

Oh, and if you’re not on Twitter already, you should be!

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