///message #1 mission statement

Hi to you friend, if you happen to be reading this.

This little blog will be my fashion marketing master. I intend to learn this stuff by studying relevant literature on topic, in conjunction with insight from current (academic) literature and various (online) trade publications. The focus will be the business more or less, since that is most relevant to my goals, however they may or may not be off topic currents into design. As I aim to gain a deeper understanding of product development, and a basic grasp and rudimentary 'skills' in these fields are thus necessary. Finally, developing a more nuanced look on the industry using 'advanced' statistics are invaluable in our world where geeks and math whizzes in every field of study and business have drifted to the top.

The method chosen to go about this journey is a systems learning method as propagated by Scott Adams and the method of incremental improvement propagated Jordan Peterson. The latter both specifically tailored to a subject and in all aspects of life (the sorting oneself out mantra). That synthesizing of those 2 methods of thinking is pretty much as follows (in my current understanding). Firstly, identifying where you are (knowledge skill level) and where you want to go roughly. We use the word roughly here because of the fickle nature of todays [fashion] world a very defined goal may be irrelevant, useless or prove to be unattainable in the future. The sands under our feet are shifting all the time and the world is subject to technological change at an ever increasing rate. The new technology can render the face of society and business as unrecognizable today. Also, your set goal may be a bad pick because you were uninformed at the beginning of the journey. Therefore one should aim to move in a general direction and figure out the details later. Grand strategy first, tactics second.

Secondly, the idea here is to take incremental steps learn by doing in a playful way, the things we wish to know more about need to be practiced. Creating this blog and posts would improve writing ability and offers a journal-like method of reflection. A skilled person in any activity produces more output of higher quality because he practiced, often every day. The general notion is to start with tasks you can do, and expand into to bigger things once you accumulated enough micro-skills needed for the bigger job priorly. What I would want to pay attention to as well is the idea of skill stacking, or skill set differentiation. Skill stacking is collecting a set of complementary skills, of medium-good level instead of great, and combining those to set yourself apart in your own niche. Most creative or independent professionals work on the basis of these. The advantage of this idea is that you can disregard having to be best in a certain skill - and it is a mindset that allows you work around (personal and/or genetic) limitations that cannot be altered.

And finally, the fruits of labour need to be displayed here. For the world to see. Exposed. Text, writing style, data, data analysis, layout, visuals (content and graphic design). Ideally all are displayed in some way in every entry. And one should be able to detect an upward trajectory.

What I want to convey or prove (once again) is that you do not need a school or paid-for courses to hack something together that constitutes an education. There are a lot of successful autodidact men and women out there in many fields, of many ages and with the internet it should be easier than ever before. All this stuff may be obvious to a lot of other people, but it was not for me, and writing it down makes it clear to myself and others perhaps as well. This blog is a crutch for personable development, publishing forces me to up quality and consistency, and the blog entries form a portfolio in a way. Hopefully, some people will read it and comment, thus contributing via feedback and maybe learning something themselves as well. This is A/B testing, and ideally a dialogue. Never assume I know more than you.

mmmm /// References (in the so called APA format):