Today I want to discuss something that’s sort of a popular topic with me for both personal and business success, and that is data. Similarly, you may think of never-ending information flow. Often I hear people saying that you can have things like: “Too much data,” or: “I don’t need any more info.” If you don’t need any more info, that’s kind of like saying: “I don’t need to learn anything new. I already know it all.” Remember the episodes on not making decisions early, that is a similar idea. You don’t make decisions early. Why? Because there always may be more and more information that’s going to come in that we need to hear and we need to listen to; it may tip the scales. I’ll explain this a little bit more again in a little while.

Data and Information flows into your mind throughout life. That becomes the feeling in your gut.

One of the things I used to hear a lot from some CEOs or very high-ups in any corporation is they say: “I don’t need any market research data,” or: “I don’t need any more research. I know it in my gut.” If you’ve seen the quotes, actually, there was a quote from Warren Brown, formerly the Washington Post; and Don Hilty, formerly Chief Economist for Chrysler Corporation both have said things to the fact that I’m blunt, straightforward, honest, and thorough. They liked what I said, but they didn’t always take it down easily. What does that mean? That’s exactly what I’m going to say, here, and what I have said in some things to those CEOs or general managers of major corporations.

What I would usually do, after they said they know it in their gut, I’d say: “Gee, where’d you get that gut? How did that come about? What happened?” I’d only hesitate for a moment, because I knew they didn’t know the answer and they didn’t have any real answer to it,” and I said: “We know you certainly weren’t born that way. You weren’t born as an expert in this area, so you must have acquired it over time. I wonder where you acquired it from. I guess it was from different things and experiences, right? Basically, what has happened is a lifetime of data and information has flown into you in order to form that feeling that you call your gut.” You can imagine the kind of looks I got at the time, but I tried to tip the conversation in another direction then, usually successfully. The idea was: Yes, you can always learn more.

What do you do with all of that data? Even when you have data, you have an opinion, and you have a thought, you always need to test. Test. You’ve heard of A/B testing, for you test one logo versus the other, or you test a headline versus another, an ad versus another, and you can get more extensive when you get into some higher statistical techniques. As you’re pulling in all this information and data, some people will say you have too much.

What does that really mean, “too much”? I used to get this all the time when I was first starting out in a lot of research, where somebody would say to me: “Well, you don’t want it all. How about we send it to you in groups?” By groups, they meant, for example, age groups, they might want to have 19 to 34 and 35 to 64 and 65+ or something like that. I would always say: -“Whatever you have it in, I want to see the raw stuff.” -“Well, you don’t want it by years.” I said: “If you have it by years, that’s the way I want it.”

Why would I say that? Because different things I’m looking at may have different influences. For example, the 25- to 34-year-old is really very different when you think of a 34-year-old versus a 25-year-old. These basically were the standard breakdowns that the census would break them down to, because they did aggregate them, they would have 19 to 24, 25 to 29, 30 to 34, then they would go into 10-year age groups; 35-44, etc.

What’s the significance of that? Let’s take a look at car models. A very different kind of car is bought in a person’s late 20s and early 30s than as they turn 40. When everybody was saying: “Wow,