Response Magic 
Need
to Become an Expert on a Topic Fast? Try These 3 Tricks of the Trade
By:
Betty Liu
How to become an expert in
five minutes or less.
People often ask me:
"Betty, how is it that you're able to have a conversation on air about so
many different topics?
How do you try to know
everything about every topic?"
The answer, of course, is
you don't.
Nobody can know everything
about everything.
But you can know enough to
connect with the person you're speaking with and ask the right questions.
There are people and
topics you can spend months doing research on--as I did when I first
interviewed Warren Buffett.
I read countless books on
Buffett and value investing, watched nearly all his interview videos from six
months back, and read 120-plus pages of articles on him all before our first
one-hour sit-down at his office in Omaha.
If Buffett threw me any
curveballs, I was ready.
But then there are times
when you don't have that luxury, such as when you're crashing on deadline
before your live television program.
You may have 30 minutes or
less to prepare for several interviews.
That's led me to develop a
few techniques over the years that enable me to learn almost everything I can
about a topic or person in five minutes or less.
This is useful for a
variety of situations beyond a live television interview.
Think about it--how often
do you need to know something fast about the person interviewing you for a job
or a sales client you're about to meet?
How do you go from a
"know nothing" to a "know everything" quickly?
Here are a few of the
tricks of the trade.
1. Start with a Google
search.
Sounds basic enough, right?
You'd be surprised how many people think "research" entails first
looking up a person's corporate bio or a company's website.
These are typically
useless, unless you want to know someone's official title.
If you want the real deal,
Google the person or company or topics and search under News.
Don't go back more than 12
months. Anything older is less relevant.
Read the highly
cited articles first.
Pick lengthier
articles--those usually have more contextual information.
Longer articles usually
present a counterpoint or questions surrounding the topic or person--very
critical when you want to get the full story.
2. Speed read.
I don't have any special
skill in this, but given the nature of my job, I probably read more than the
average person.
However, I don't have more
hours than the average person, so I've had to figure out a way to speed through
articles.
Usually the first three or
four paragraphs are your most critical--read those.
Look out for numbers and
names--those are usually important parts of the story and give new details.
Skim the first few words
of each new paragraph to see if they're critical to the story.
Rarely read the last
paragraph, unless it's an opinion piece, in which case that's usually the
so-called money quote by the writer.
People tend to want to end
their op-eds with a commanding statement that says it all.
3. Look up social media
accounts.
Thank goodness for social
media.
I learn more about a
person through their Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts than a regular
old news article.
Mark Cuban says more on
Twitter than he does in a one-on-one with Re/code.
That's because people use
these platforms to tell you what interests them.
You can use these points
to connect and learn.
No need to go back too
far--the most recent 30 days of tweets or Facebook posts are more than enough
to know what's caught the person's fancy.
Now go hit the books!
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