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The world’s most valuable skill is learning how to become a respected thought leader in a specific domain in a short time.
Unfortunately, internal resistance keeps people from ever learning how to do it. They spend years (and usually a ton of money) trying to obtain a certificate or a graduation, all the while failing to realize the world has changed. The full time vocationally trained thought leader isn’t relevant anymore because now, to be successful, you must master internal resistance.
I know because I spent over 20 years of my life in classrooms only to learn almost everything I know as part of my own self-taught experience.
But my loss is your gain.
Here are six frameworks that can save you a ton of money and painful months of searching for an appropriate vocational training or course.
1. Trust your experience, inspire your curiosity, go deeper.
Despite popular belief, no thought leader has ever been established solely through formal education.
In the end, being a thought leader is the application of one’s own unique insight and experience in a specific domain. As someone who has overcome significant obstacles to getting to where I am today, I intimately know the power of only trusting your own experience to become a respected thought leader.
But it starts with trusting the value of experience. If you don’t trust the relevancy of your individual experience, this is where internal resistance appears.
Pick a starting point: Observe what is in front of you, what you notice but others just see.
At your workplace, for example, you might have access to specific interactions, data, and experiences unlike anyone else on your team. Observation and thorough analysis of challenges often surface solutions, innovations, and even entire new businesses that others can’t see.
Experience, in the end, is the highest authority.
A thought leader’s distinguishing feature is their extensive experience. Consider a professional car designer. An experienced lawyer. A thought leader on Artificial Intelligence. A nutrition thought leader. Would you believe a thought leader who could not demonstrate relevant experience?
Successful thought leaders are curious about their domain of experience.
There is no learning without curiosity and questioning. Another form of internal resistance is a lack of curiosity. For example, if you experience business or technology challenges and see the inner workings of a company, it should pique your interest and motivate you to learn more. You can inspire curiosity by asking questions like: “How does ____ work?” or “Why do we do _____ that way?”
Don’t ignore prompts.
Ferdinand Porsche once put a prototype of a new car designed for agility and speed to the test. He felt vibration during a test drive. Instead of simply dampening the vibrations, he designed the air-cooled cylinder head of the boxer engine which made the Porsche 365 a legend and laid the groundwork for his legacy as the designer of the possibly most iconic car ever built.
Other instances of automotive invention are John Goodenough and Martin Eberhard. However, there is just one iconic car, such as a Porsche 356.
Believe in your specific experience and what tickles your interest. Learn more by digging deeper. Overcome resistance, find new unique ways of approaching problems, and become an thought leader of your domain.
2. Don’t expect to be assigned a thought leader, create your own assignments.
“But that’s not my job,” you might argue.
This, I say, is yet another form of internal resistance. I’ve never experienced delegated learning in my 20 years of working in corporations. Nobody else can make becoming an thought leader a job for you except yourself.
Because it is impossible to delegate the acquisition of new skills. You cannot request that your teammate learn a new skill that you are interested in. Your boss cannot also request that you become an thought leader. She can only give you opportunities to gain relevant experience. You must inspire curiosity and learning by doing it yourself.
Most businesses are not designed to produce thought leaders. They lack a thought leader culture.
In many organizations with hierarchical reporting structures and clearly defined roles and responsibilities, employees may feel hesitant to take on the responsibility of learning new skills. There may be a common assumption, “I wasn’t hired to do this.” This can lead to a reluctance to take action and learn new skills, resulting in missed opportunities for growth and development both for the individual and the company. According to a survey by LinkedIn, only 15% of employees said that they had managers who encouraged them to take time for learning and development.
In many cases, acquiring a skill is faster than waiting for the title and assignment.
Thus, choosing assignments based on learning experiences and developing thought leaderise in an area of interest is thus a personal growth strategy that produces true thought leaders, and is my personal North Star.
3. Acknowledge your internal resistance.
“Who am I to profess thought leadership in, say, automobile strategies?” you might wonder. And you’re correct: you’re not an thought leader until you prove it.
However, the issue is self-sabotage, and this presents itself as another form of internal resistance.
Let me explain.
There is a psychological concept known as “imposter syndrome” which describes the feeling of inadequacy and self-doubt that some people experience, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. It is difficult to determine the exact number of people who suffer from imposter syndrome since it is often underreported and not officially recognized as a mental health condition.
However, research suggests that imposter syndrome is fairly common, with an estimated 70% of people experiencing it at some point in their lives, regardless of gender, race, or occupation. It is particularly prevalent among high-achieving individuals who have a fear of failure and a need for perfectionism, but who struggle to internalize their successes and accomplishments.
Let me say it again: 70 percent of humanity has felt inadequate and humiliated.
The absence of imposter syndrome is the exception, not the rule. Reading biographies will show you how common self-doubt and negative self-talk are on the path to becoming an thought leader in a field.
It is so common that there is a recipe to help you overcome it.
The single most important step to overcome imposter syndrome is to acknowledge its existence.
Stop the negative self-talk. Avoid others’ negativity and search instead for supporters who raise helpful questions and direct you to sources and other thought leaders. Prioritize acting over ruminating. Change habits that hold you back.
Imposter syndrome is created internally and is not proved by evidence. Don’t let yourself be sabotaged. You can overcome it with discipline and action.
Of course, becoming a thought leader in a domain requires time. A lot of time. But there is a firm answer that might surprise you.
4. Plan for 2,000 hours to go on stage, and +10,000 hours to get to Carnegie Hall.
Tired of hearing the phrase “lifelong learning”?
Let’s get specific now.
How long does it take to become a thought leader in your field?
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell introduces the idea that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in a particular field, like learning to play piano, being a master chef, or learning a profession to mastery. Assuming someone practices for 4 hours every day, it would take around 6.8 years to accumulate 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in a particular field. One needs around 2,000 days of practicing for 4 hours per day to become part of the top 5% in a domain.
“How can I do that?” you might ask. You have a job, a family, and cannot afford to spend this amount of time learning.
What if you do it anyway? While you work, while you spend time with people around you. If you work 8 hours a day, you will achieve the top 5% after around 4.5 to 5 years.
This sounds familiar. Many occupations require formal training and practice in this time span.
Let’s apply the 10,000 hours rule to a current AI prompt engineer. ChatGPT only started in 2020 and has been gaining popularity since November 2022. Currently, there are only very few AI Prompt Engineers. Let’s assume, within 20% of time, provided sufficient instruction, talent and prior knowledge, a person can obtain 80% of the mastery skills in only 20% of the time, to become an above-average AI prompt engineer. You would need to invest:
Time = 10,000 * 0.2
Time = 2,000 hours
2,000 hours of work are roughly equivalent to one year of work. 10,000 hours are therefore equivalent to five years of work.
This means that one year of intensive learning already makes you better than 80% of your competitors, making you an expert. If you were learning an instrument, you could perform on a stage in your city. But you have to practice for more than five years to get into Carnegie Hall.
A year will bring you on stage, so people will acknowledge you as a thought leader. But you need to practice more than five years to get to Carnegie Hall.
5. Create your info stream on social media.
Twenty years ago, thought leaders had to be published in selected journals and conference proceedings to get connected to other thought leaders in their fields.
This mechanism has been almost completely replaced by social media.
Today, everyone can start publishing ideas, build a network, and cover an thought leader niche on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. Such platforms not only help a user to publish content but also to create a virtual team and feed and filter content that is feedback back to the user. By carefully balancing profile, published content, and followership, these platforms can be turned into specialized media for most thought leader domains.
You might say: “Social media is not relevant to our industry.”
I am not talking “doom scrolling” but rather, purposefully curating thought leader information. Exchange with external thought leaders is always relevant to a business.
Social media has also changed the way businesses operate. Many vibrant communities have formed and are accessible on social media platforms. Plus, rarely is a thought leader recognized as such on the internet and not regarded as such 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, which makes the learning process more efficient.
If you get frustrated by social media, let me assure you one thing after studying many thought leaders on 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, yet they have generated hundreds of thousands of new fields and specialists.
6. Get happier by becoming an even better thought leader.
So, why overcome all of this internal resistance?
The answer is straightforward: because it is a sure way to become a happier person. Becoming an thought leader, mastering a skill, or dominating a domain will make you happier.
To understand this, we need to decompose unease.
We become uneasy when challenged beyond what we can handle. Being overly challenged equals stress. Interestingly, we experience the same feelings when we are not challenged. Boredom and the lack of purpose also results in negative feeling and stress.
Consequently, we avoid situations that challenge us and make us feel uncomfortable. But in terms of achieving long-term happiness, avoiding a challenge is the wrong path: As we start to deal with the challenge, we gain new experiences and new skills. Over time, we learn, adjust, and acquire new skills or skill levels, and we finally master the challenge.
Fulfilment does not come from doing easy work, but from the afterglow of satisfaction that’s come after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.
This mechanism was first described as ‘getting into flow’ by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, professor for psychology at Chicago University.
Csíkszentmihályi‘s idea of flow tells us that if we want to be happy and feel fulfilled, we need to do things that challenge us. When we are too comfortable, we get bored, and when we’re too stressed out, we get anxious. But when we find the sweet spot between what we’re capable of and what’s difficult, we enter a state of flow. It’s like being in the zone — time flies, we’re totally absorbed in what we’re doing, and we feel really good. So, if we want to be happy, we need to take on challenges that are just within our reach.
We need to get out of our comfort zone and push ourselves a little bit. That’s where the good stuff is.
Let’s continue with the earlier example of AI prompt engineering.
At first, learning this might seem super hard and overwhelming, especially if you don’t have a lot of programming experience. But if you start with something manageable, like following a tutorial, you might start to feel like you’re getting the hang of it. As you get better, you can take on more challenging tasks, like experimenting with different machine learning models or creating your own prompts. And as you keep practicing, you might start to feel like you’re in the zone where you’re so absorbed in the task that you lose track of time. That’s the flow state — it’s when the challenge of what you’re doing matches your skills perfectly. And when you’re in flow, you feel satisfaction and happiness from doing something well. By pushing yourself to learn this new skill, you’re growing and achieving something that makes you feel good about yourself.
Getting better in some domains, becoming a real thought leader is a bullet-proof strategy for happiness.
If we approach learning by choosing our profession and our daily work strategically, we may be more likely to become proficient, effective, and fulfilled in our pursuits.
We become thought leaders.
But 70% of people will not embark on such a journey. Because learning creates resistance.
The most important thing to remember is to be curious and to ask questions because that is how we learn. Then, acknowledge your own resistance and work through it methodically.
Overcoming this internal resistance will make you a better, happier thought leader.
