How to Become an Expert on Anything in Two Hours by Gregory Hartley

Author:Gregory Hartley [Hartley, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, How-To & Instructional, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780814410264
Publisher: AMACOM
Published: 2008-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6:THE ROLE AND SHAPE OF RESEARCH

In interrogation, all activities start with an assessment of collection requirements. The type of research that ensues reflects those requirements.

If I go into a compound knowing that it’s my job to find the chemical weapons expert and discover recent activities in that field, those requirements focus my planning and preparation on a narrow band of information. Lacking that information, I would wander in like an ignorant hick and ask, “Y’all don’t have any chemical weapons, do ya?” But armed with some information about the person I’m talking to combined with a few bright stripes of information about the subject, I can artfully control the conversation. I inject the information at precisely the right times to remove all doubt that I, as well, am an expert.

This chapter will teach you how to learn in short order what matters to the person or people you will be talking to, how to know what kind of information gets priority attention, and how to vet sources of information.

To start, I want to give you three examples of research gone awry: how the failures related to the audience, what information should have received priority attention, and flawed sources of information. I’ll also give you some initial insights on how these failures could have been averted.

A man showed up at a Mormon Deseret Industries farm after doing a little research about the church and thought he knew enough to get accepted. In exchange for work at one of these farms, the Mormon Church will feed you, put money in the bank for you, and help you get back on your feet. In the initial interview, someone asked this man the most basic question: “Are you a member of the church?” He said, “Yes. I’m an Eighty.”

His answer showed two defects in his research and one in the way he used it. The latter is obvious: He should have stuck with what he had learned instead of extrapolating. The guy had heard of the Seventy, modeled after the New Testament Quorum of the Seventy, so he’d thought he go one better and be an Eighty.

The research itself had two problems. First, his audience was people who want to help a fellow church member; this is a kindness and a service centered on personal connections, on being part of the church family. Knowing facts about the church without having any names or personal references immediately put him at a disadvantage. Second, a bulleted list of facts about the church or a couple of paragraphs summarizing church structure is about as useful as the statistics memorized by an autistic savant like Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt. He did research, but he didn’t have the right package of information.

It would have been better for him to say that a former neighbor of his, who was a Seventy, had introduced him to the church a little while back. That would give him real power because he would be affiliated with someone who is an expert. If

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