I will research what I need to know
Daily Keys to Success
These daily excerpts from Randy Kay's book Daily Keys to Success will show you how to grow your potential while expanding your personal success to lead a life of significance. You will benefit from 365 topics with ideas, tools, and tactics for living life fully.
An uninformed decision is an unnecessary risk. It’s important that we have at least a threshold of knowledge before jumping into something. Nobody can be expected to know all, or even a small fraction of all there is to know. Even within your field of expertise, chances are you could know a lot more about what you do. You don’t need to know everything, but you should be able to expeditiously and easily find out what more you need to know. That means learning to conduct online research and tap other sources, like subject experts.
There are over eighty billion web pages published, most of which are worthless. To successfully get through to the useful ones, you must use effective filtering tools. If your research requires highly credible facts and figures, you need to scrutinize every resource. If you want more opinion-based information, then you have more latitude in perusing different sources. Blogs like Consumer Reports are good places to solicit differing opinions. Topical discussion forums and commercial sites like About.com are good resources, as well.
For accurate, factual information avoid the opinion blogs. Your research should focus on experts, academics, and professionals with high credibility. Research academic journals, government publications (like USA.gov), scientific and medical sites like WebMD.com and Scirus.com, and objective non- government sites like Consumer Watch. Reliable search engines include Wikipedia, Internet Public Library, Google, Ask.com, and Invisible Web. A knowledge-driven (non-commercial) site like Surfwax can help with purist reearch; Scirus is good for scientific research; and the US Government Library of Congress can source a wide range of historical information.
Be careful with personal and commercial web pages that are promoting an agenda. Pages with advertisements may represent a bias that can influence facts. Commercial sites can provide useful data, but be wary of surveys that are heavily slanted. Of course, there are numerous other non-Internet research tools—from personal surveys, interviews, and talking with customers and businesses, to trade publications, bookstores, and libraries. The key is to gain enough information to make an informed decision without burying yourself in it all. Good luck!
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” ~ Albert Einstein