Winging it. Its a way of life for our generation, an approach toward success that is not only accepted but endorsed.

We have all heard the saying “fake it until you make it.” The idea is simple: use your resources efficiently and convince people you are smarter than you are, hoping that the facade will open doors that were otherwise closed. By Winging It you can pave the road to an early success.

 Lately there seems to be a surge of search engines, applications, and tools that enable this very philosophy. For example VeryRecent.com is one of my personal favorites. Anytime I have a phone call with a client I click over to VeryRecent.com and search their company or possibly the name of the person I have a call with. This site spits back the latest hit on any search query, this spans not just news sites, but blogs, social media sites, sponsored postings. It’s amazing. It’s like injecting the most relevant, up-to-date information on any topic into the forefront of your mind. It’s like my own personal arsenal of ammunition, allowing me to speak on topics I really have no place speaking on. That’s just one example of the tools available to help our generation appear smarter than we really are.

     I say “our generation” because this approach used to be looked down upon. Our parents, teachers, and bosses followed a different philosophy—“If you don’t know what you are talking about, stop talking.” For us its more like, “If you don’t know what you are talking about, go Google it, text a bulleted list to yourself, and talk the hell out of it in front of anyone and everyone that will listen.”

    Oh how times have changed.

     Winging It has become a cultural expectation for our Web 2.0 world. It’s allowed 20-year olds to pitch out-of-the-box ideas to venture capitalists and three years later cash out as billionaires. It has allowed people with hobbies to stay at home and make careers out of their love of writing or coding or marketing. We don’t even need to take classes anymore—hell my current job position doesn’t even have a college degree available for it yet. Thank goodness everything we need to know is at our fingertips, on our FriendFeeds, posted to Twitter, streamlined to my Google Reader. It’s an overdose of stats, connections, and opportunity—and I love it.

     Where am I going with this? For those of you contemplating a career move but find yourself stalling I urge you to embrace the culture of Winging It. I assure you the competition is.

    Keep in mind that if you fake it long enough… you might just make it. All of the last minute cramming of knowledge might just make its way to your long term memory and after enough time you will have built up a database of information on a breadth of industry subjects. You will have “winged it” to the top of your game—and that makes for good bragging rights.  

Looking for other ways to Wing It?

Set up Google Alerts--enter a competitor or word you want to track and Google will email you once a day with a list of articles referencing it.

Bookmark SocialMention.com--a search engine of social media, insert a term and it will search blogs, micro-blogs, profiles, multi-media, etc.

Ask Cha-Cha-- Text any question to "ChaCha" or "242242", a mobile service that allows you to ask any question, and they will search it and send you back an answer immediately.