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The most valuable skill in the world is learning how to become a respected thought leader.
High-earning employees, successful non-fiction authors, experts with a strong media presence, successful doctors, lawyers, designers, consultants and successful top managers have one characteristic in common: they are seen as thought leaders, experts, thought leaders, for which they are paid a lot of money because they can create enormous value in their environment.
Talent, chance or background alone are not enough, but discipline in overcoming resistance is.
Because essentially, internal resistance keeps us from becoming a true expert. We spend years (and usually a lot of money) getting a certificate or degree without being able to respond to the fact that the world has changed in the meantime. The full-time expert is far from being a thought leader.
I have spent 20 years of my life in formal education (school, university, doctorate). Only to realize that almost everything I know and that is relevant to my profession I learned self-taught.
My loss, your gain. Here are six principles that may save you money and years of searching for another suitable education.
1. trust your perception, awaken your curiosity, go deeper.
Contrary to popular belief, a thought leader has never emerged through education alone.
Ultimately, a thought leader is someone who applies their unique knowledge and experience in a specific area. Becoming an expert therefore begins with trusting the value of experience. If you don’t trust the relevance of your individual perception and experience, inner resistance automatically arises.
So choose a starting point: recognize what is in front of you.
Thought leaders recognize things that others only see.
In your job, for example, you most likely have access to exclusive information, data and experience. Unlike the others in your team or the competition. Observing and thoroughly analyzing this information, which only you can see, often produces original perspectives, innovative solutions and sometimes even entire new businesses that others simply cannot see.
In the end, individual experience generates the highest authority.
A thought leader is characterized by their extensive experience. Think of a successful car designer. Or an experienced lawyer. Or a thought leader in the field of artificial intelligence. A thought leader in the field of healthy eating. Would you trust a thought leader who has no relevant experience?
Thought leaders are constantly curious within their domain.
There is no learning without curiosity and questioning. A lack of curiosity is another form of internal resistance that prevents us from becoming experts. For example, if you have the opportunity to experience business or technological challenges and see the inner workings of a company, this should pique your interest and motivate you to learn more. Curiosity manifests itself in questions such as: “How does ____ work?” or “Why do we do _____ like this?”
Don’t ignore any details, but go deeper and deeper.
Ferdinand Porsche once tested the prototype of a new car designed for agility and speed. He felt vibrations during a test drive. Instead of simply dampening the vibrations, he designed the air-cooled cylinder head of the boxer engine that made the Porsche 365 a legend and laid the foundation for his legacy as the designer of perhaps the most iconic car of all time.
Believe in what you see and what arouses your interest. Learn more by digging deeper. Overcome resistance, find new, unique ways to tackle problems and sooner or later become a thought leader in your domain.
2. do not expect to be appointed as a “thought leader”.
“But that’s not part of my job,” you might object.
But that is another form of inner resistance.
In my 25-year career in large companies, I have never experienced “delegated learning”. Even if you do a job for a very long time, you may be an “experienced professional”, but not a thought leader. No one and no job can make you a thought leader, only you.
Because it is impossible to delegate the acquisition of new skills.
You can’t ask your teammate to learn a new skill. Neither can your boss demand that you become a thought leader. As a manager, you can only give yourself the opportunity to gain relevant experience. Only you can be curious and learn.
Most companies are not designed to produce thought leaders. They lack a thought leader culture.
In many companies with hierarchical reporting structures and clearly defined roles and responsibilities, employees are reluctant to take responsibility for learning new skills.
There is often the assumption: “I wasn’t hired to do this”. And that is usually correct.
However, this leads to people being reluctant to take the initiative and acquire new skills, resulting in missed opportunities for growth and development for both the individual and the company. According to a LinkedIn survey, only 15% of employees said that their managers encourage them to take time for learning and development.
However, acquiring a skill is usually quicker than waiting for the title and the job.
That’s why choosing a job based on “What can I learn?” and growing into a thought leader is a real personal career strategy and my personal “North Star”.
3. recognize your inner resistance.
“Who am I to be/become a real thought leader?” you may be asking yourself. And you’re right: you’re not a thought leader until you’ve proven it.
Nevertheless, this question is perfect self-sabotage, another form of inner resistance.
Let me explain.
There is a psychological concept known as “imposter syndrome”, which describes the feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt that some people experience when writing, speaking or performing in public.
Research shows that impostor syndrome is common and is estimated to affect 70% of people at some point in their lives, regardless of gender, race or occupation. It is particularly common in high achievers who are afraid of failure, have a perfectionist tendency and have difficulty internalizing their successes and achievements.
Let me say it again: 70 percent of humanity feels inadequate and irrelevant.
The absence of impostor syndrome is the exception, not the rule. Reading biographies shows how common self-doubt and negative self-talk are on the way to becoming a thought leader in a field.
It is so common that there are recipes against it.
The most important step in overcoming impostor syndrome is to realize that almost everyone is afflicted by it, most likely you too.
Stop talking negatively to yourself. Avoid the negativity of others and instead seek supporters who ask helpful questions and refer to sources and other thought leaders.
Prioritize action over brooding. Change habits that hold you back.
The impostor syndrome is triggered internally. Don’t let it sabotage you. You can overcome it with discipline and action.
Of course, it takes time to become a thought leader in an area. A lot of time. Exactly how much might surprise you.
4. 2,000 hours until the first performance and +10,000 hours until Carnegie Hall.
If someone on the street in New York asks: “How do I get into Carnegie Hall?” The answer is: “Practice, practice, practice.”
How long does it take to become a thought leader in your field?
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell states that it takes about 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery in a particular field, such as learning to play the piano, being a master chef or learning and mastering a trade.
If you assume that someone practices 4 hours a day, it would take around 6.8 years to accumulate 10,000 hours of conscious practice in a particular area. It takes around 2,500 days of practicing for 4 hours a day to be in the top 5% in an area.
“How am I supposed to do that?” you might ask yourself. You have a job, you have a family, you can’t afford to spend so much time studying.
What if you do it anyway? While you work, while you spend time with the people around you. If you work 8 hours a day, you will reach the top 5% after about 4.5 to 5 years.
This sounds familiar to us. Many professions require formal training and practice for around this length of time.
Let’s apply the 10,000 hour rule to a current AI prompt engineer.
ChatGPT was only introduced in 2020 and has been gaining popularity since November 2022.
Currently, there are very few AI prompt engineers. Assuming a person masters 80% of the skills in 20% of the time, provided they have enough guidance, talent and prior knowledge, they can become an above-average AI prompt engineer in 20% of the time.
You would have to invest:
Time = 10,000 * 0.2
Time = 2,000 hours to become an above-average AI-Prompt-Engineer
2,000 working hours correspond roughly to one working year. 10,000 hours therefore correspond to five working years.
In other words, one year of intensive study makes you better than 80% of your competitors, making you an expert. If you were to learn an instrument, you could perform on a stage in your city. But you have to practise for more than five years to get to Carnegie Hall.
So you could say that five intensive years of experience and learning can shape a thought leader.
5. create your infostream in the social media.
Twenty years ago, thought leaders needed to be published in selected journals and conference proceedings to connect with other experts in their field.
This mechanism has been almost completely replaced by social media.
Nowadays, anyone can start publishing ideas, building a network and covering a niche as a thought leader on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. These platforms not only help the user to publish content, but also to build a virtual team and to collect and filter content that represents feedback for the user. With a careful balance between profile, published content and followers, these platforms can become specialized media for most thought leader areas.
You could say: “Social media is not relevant for our industry.”
And that may be true for very specific domains. But I’m not talking about “doom scrolling”, clicking on from one sensational piece of news to the next piece of wisdom, but about the targeted curation of thought leaders. The exchange with other experts is always relevant and is often easily possible via social media.
Social media has also changed the way companies work. Many expert communities have formed and exchange ideas on social media platforms. In addition, it is rare for a thought leader to be recognized as such on the Internet, but ignored within a company.
It has never been easier to become a thought leader than with today’s technology.
Being selectively active on social media has one advantage: the user can curate the most up-to-date, signal-rich source of information in the feed to increase thought leadership. In this way, a platform can bundle many other sources of information, making the learning process more efficient.
If you’re frustrated with social media, I can assure you, having studied many thought leaders in social media: It all takes time. Building a community requires months of consistent activity on social media.
But the platforms cannot be ignored by most thought leaders because they have spawned hundreds of thousands of new domains and experts.
6. become happier by becoming an even better expert.
So why overcome all this inner resistance?
The answer is simple: because it’s a sure way to become a happier person.
Ein Thought Leader zu werden, eine Fähigkeit zu beherrschen oder einen Bereich zu dominieren, wird Sie glücklicher machen.
To understand this, we need to take a closer look at “discomfort and stress”.
We feel uncomfortable when we are asked to do more than we can cope with. Excessive demands mean stress. Interestingly, we experience the same feelings when we are not challenged. Boredom and meaninglessness also lead to discomfort and stress.
That’s why we avoid situations that challenge us unduly and are unpleasant.
But when it comes to long-term happiness, avoiding challenges is the wrong way to go: When we rise to the challenge, we gain new experiences and skills. Over time, we learn, adapt, acquire new skills or skill levels and eventually master the challenge.
Fulfillment does not come from easy work, but from the satisfaction that comes when you have mastered a difficult task that has demanded everything of you.
This mechanism was first described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago.
Csíkszentmihályi’s flow idea tells us that we need to do things that challenge us if we want to be happy and feel fulfilled. If we are too comfortable, we get bored, and if we are too stressed, we get anxious. But when we find the sweet spot between what we can do and what is difficult, we enter a state of “flow”. It’s as if we’re in the zone – time flies by, we’re fully engaged and we feel really good. So if we want to be happy, we need to take on challenges that are within our reach.
We need to get out of our comfort zone and push ourselves a little. That’s where the good things happen.
Let’s continue with the previous example of AI prompt engineering.
At first glance, learning can seem very difficult and overwhelming, especially if you don’t have much experience with programming. But if you start with something manageable, such as following a tutorial, you may soon get the hang of it.
As you get better, you can move on to more challenging tasks, such as experimenting with different language models. And if you keep practicing, you might feel like you’re “in the zone”, where you’re so engrossed in the task that you lose track of time.
This is the state of flow – the moment when the challenge of what you are doing perfectly matches your abilities. And when you’re in flow, you experience a sense of satisfaction and happiness that comes from doing something really well. By forcing yourself to learn this new skill, you grow and achieve something that makes you feel good. Getting better in some areas, becoming a true thought leader, is a pretty sure strategy for personal happiness.
When we approach learning by strategically choosing our profession and our daily work, we are more likely to become competent, effective and fulfilled in what we do.
We are becoming thought leaders.
And 70% of people will not embark on this journey. Because learning creates resistance. And that is unpleasant.
The most important thing is to be curious and ask questions, because that’s how we learn.
Then recognize your own resistance and work on it methodically.
Overcoming these inner resistances will make you a better and happier thought leader.
