I actively try to learn something new every day. I find myself picking interesting things from my Google+ feed every day and saving them to review in the evening.I generally find that the "Inbound Marketing" community is really generous in the content and ideas that are shared which often means that I have more things to sift through in the evening then I have time available.Because of this overabundance of interesting content I often forget to look for "new" ideas or inspiration outside of my usual sources. My daily collection of content to review generally includes snippets covering a variety of subjects including SEO, social media, new tools, CRO, neuroscience, human perception, influence, entrepreneurial stuff and web design (or at least that's what I tell everyone, it's mainly just lol-cats, rage comics and XKCD). For some reason I rarely pick out much content about "conventional" advertising though.Perhaps this was why I was so impressed with Dave Trott's talk when we attended Brighton SEO this year. The rest of the event and other speakers were great (thanks Kelvin & team) but Dave was from a background I was much less familiar with.He was speaking at Brighton SEO yet his talk was nothing to do with SEO.His talk was about "predatory thinking". It was entertaining, thought provoking and most of all, made me wonder how I'd never heard of Dave before. I felt that much of what he talked about resonated with me, particularly what he said about turning situations you can't control into situations you can control. More than that though, I found that I felt that a lot of his anecdotes and his unique perspective built from a successful career in advertising were really interesting. Where I had been reading several pieces of content a night to find something interesting, I found that almost every single anecdote Dave had was interesting. So much so that I bought his book Creative Mischief.If you haven't got it, get it. It's about seven pounds on Amazon and I read it in an afternoon. It's broken down into very short chapters; each only a few pages long. It's easy to read but regardless of your interests or profession I'm sure you won't be able to put it down. Each of the 60 or so chapters is a gem in itself and I will be revisiting each of them.You can also find his blog here.After coming across Dave Trott at Brighton SEO it made me wonder who else I've yet to pick up on? If you've got any suggestions outside of the normal digital marketing circles then leave me a message in the comments.It's getting late and I still have a handful of blog posts to read through this evening - oh wait a minute, forget that, someone just sent me a video of cat fighting a printer.
