Jack Trout

We Don't Know Jack.




What I Learned from Jack Trout:

In one of the best selling business books ever published:
“Positioning - The Battle for your Mind” Jack Trout offered 5 basic principals of the mind to explain the challenges that marketers face in getting their message through. Jack and his coauthor Al Ries state:

• Minds are Limited

• Minds Hate Confusion

• Minds are Insecure

• Minds Don’t Change

• Minds Lose Focus

As the famous author Mark Twain said “It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble, It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

Extensive and ongoing research corroborates that human beings tend
to assume they know much more than they actually do. And we tend
to overestimate our ability to guess, or predict, what we don't know.

We have a tendency to seek out facts that support the beliefs we already have, ignore evidence that points the other way, and cling to our opinions, even wrong ones, like drowning men to life preservers. Simon & Garfunkle sang about it, " A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest " and Albert Einstein probably said it best with "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." But we sure try, don’t we? We surround ourselves with comfortable like thinkers, and seek out and associate with those who affirm our preconceptions. Then we tidy it all up with our rationalizations in familiar little boxes that make sense to us.

None of us like the discomfort of cognitive dissonance - whatever the cause – but perhaps that is where real growth and learning begins.

We Don’t Know Jack.

That’s what I learned from Jack Trout.

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Jack Trout
Positioning