Emilia Quinn’s 2 Cents #8 – Knowledge is power
So as we all know this two cents blog is it’s pretty much all based on my opinion. However I rarely speak about things that I don’t feel I am qualified to speak about on a public platform nor will I give advice when I don’t know what I’m talking about. Something I do know and feel strongly about is that knowledge is power.
If I don’t know something or I don’t know how to give advice about something I will go and research it and gain knowledge, even if it doesn’t seem relevant to my situation at the time. I still find it really beneficial to gain knowledge about various things.
Having an open mind is so important in a creative industry partly because the industry is constantly changing. I mean look at the Instagram and Facebook algorithms. It feels like they change pretty much every day and you have to adapt and be able to market yourself creatively to reach your desired audience. If you want to get your brand to the people who will buy into it and love your product (in my case music) you need to play the game and come up with new ways of getting your content out there almost on the daily.
This is why knowledge is power. When you gain knowledge you gain the power to put ideas into action. Or the ability to give your friends good advice, or to form your own opinions on different things and not just take somebody’s word for it. But you can’t do any of this without having an open mind and learning first.
Learning and educating yourself is one of those most valuable tools you will ever have and everyone can do this. Pretty much everyone has access somehow to the internet and let’s face it you can google pretty well anything.
Of course there is the flipside to that the internet is full of biased opinions like mine on this blog but when you have an open mind you can take information from various conflicting sources and form your own opinion using those sources.
I’m not saying you need to know everything about everything, but rather than accepting something is fact, question it and research it. This doesn’t mean you don’t trust the source it’s coming from but it’s always a good exercise for your brain to question and find out more information. Say it is a fact, the research you just did on it taught you a whole bunch more about it and maybe led you to new pieces of knowledge you might not have even considered looking up.
In our industry there are a lot of people telling us that they can do such and such for us and we don’t have to spend the time learning how to do it.Obviously there is a time and place for these sorts of services but how do you know you’re not being bullshitted if you don’t have at least a little bit of knowledge in that area first.
Knowledge gives you the power to protect yourself against scammy businesses and we all know that there are lots of scams out there whether you’re a musician or not.
So if you do one thing for yourself today, do a little bit of research on something you’re not sure about and don’t just take somebody else’s word for it. It might even lead you into an informational hole that sparks some creativity!
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Emilia’s columns are always required reading.