Some Advice

I feel wildly unqualified to write this page, though I’m not sure anyone is qualified. The “path to thought leadership” (as if that’s a destination…) is different for everyone, but given my experience, this is what I think might work.

Do the Work

As we’ve talked about multiple times in these pages, you just have to do with the work. You have to have something to talk about – either specific instances (acute) or a career’s worth of perspective (aggregate).

The world does not need more people who exaggerate work or talk about things they have not done. We probably don’t even need more pundits, meaning people who simply talk about other people’s work.

The world needs people who do the work.

This means you might not have a lot to talk about at the start of your career. That’s okay. You have a long road ahead of you, so lengthen your time horizon and listen more than you talk.

Enlarge Your Perspective

Do you know the larger picture of what you’re doing? Do you know the success criteria for your organization? Do you know how they keep score? In crass commercial terms, do you know how your organization makes money?

When you work, always ask yourself, how does this specific task fit into the larger picture? How does what I’m doing fit into that larger picture? Could what I’m doing be avoided by solving a bigger problem?

Always try to think “one level up.” Everything you do has a reason. Always interrogate the problem. Why is the organization doing that?

Learn to Explain Things

To create effective content, you will have to explain things. And it’s not enough that it makes sense to you – it has to make sense to other people.

Write. A lot. And ask people to read what you’ve written and tell you if it makes sense. Ask them questions about what you wrote to make sure the understand it the way you intended. And if they don’t, know that it’s not their fault – it’s yours.

Write even when you don’t intend to publish. Write just for yourself. Journal.

Talk to yourself in the car. Or talk to your sound recorder. Explain concepts out loud until you’ve made them as clear as you can make them. Drill problems down to their essence. Learn to cut extraneous stuff out.

And read. A lot. Read just to understand how people explain things. If something was really readable and taught you a lot, ask yourself why. What did the author do that made it fun to read? What made it clear?

The best writers are usually always prolific readers.

Get a Digital Space

You need a channel. Make some decisions about where that’s going to be.

You need an outlet that offers you the ability to publish items of arbitrary length and format. A “blog” (like that has a strict definition…) provides this. Get your own domain name – own your URL space.

If you don’t want to go that far, then you can publish to social media. Micro-blogging platforms like Bluesky are really only good for promotion – pointing people to other channels. LinkedIn limits post length and media embedding, but it does offer an “article” feature that gives you some room to breathe.

Find a channel. You can use other platforms, but drive people back to your digital “home.” Accumulate content there.

Choosing where to publishing something introduces unnecessary friction. Make these decisions in advance.

Go Deep on Something

A “T-shaped” person is someone who has abroad array of skills and understanding, but who goes deep on one particular area. (It’s the shape of a T – broad across the top, but reaching deep below…)

In your particular field, pick some particular aspect or thing that fascinates you, and really dig into it. Learn everything you can, and try to become the world’s foremost expert on it. That might be totally unrealistic, but that’s okay – the value is in the process.

Read the history of the problem. Try to find the primary sources. For technology, read the original specification. If this thing came from some legislation, literally find the speeches made on the legislative floor. You want to understand not just the solution, but the original problem from the perspective of the people who wrestled with it.

In particular, get past the common questions – the questions that 99% of people have. Move past them until you’re looking for answers to the really unique and obscure questions.

If this sounds exhausting, then narrow your focus. Find an aspect of your industry where you can become “the person” to consult on it.

Why? Because you need to grok something. You need to understand it down to its roots and not depend on anyone else’s interpretation of it. You need to figure out what it means to you, and start thinking about original problems related to it.

There are practical benefits to this, certainly, but there’s also a lot of personal growth. By becoming an unqualified expert on one small aspect of something, you’ll beging to understand how to explain it to people, and how to own it.

Make Peace with Evolution and Imperfection

You need to look at your content as an “evolving body of work,” not a curated Instagram pic. It might not stand for all eternity. In fact, some of it might be a little cringey or embarrassing in the future. Learning and leading is a messy business sometimes, full of red herrings, misunderstandings, embarrassment, and dead ends.

Don’t let this stop you from publishing.

How you explain things, or your personal history or views on something, will change over time, and this is okay. You can revise or qualify things later, add a disclaimer, update with a postscript – whatever. Just don’t think what you write about something tomorrow has to be perfect and stand unchanged forever.

You might sound stupid in retrospect. That’s okay. It means you’re growing. If you’re gonna be stupid, be stupid in the past tense.

Develop Collection Systems

You need a place to “park” ideas. You should have some note-taking app available to you wherever you are.

You will get ideas at the weirdest times. More importantly – you’ll get half of an idea. It will tug at you, and you’ll need to write it down somewhere, then get back to it. In doing this, it “registers” itself in your brain as something you’re thinking about. Mentally, you’ll add it – you’ll come back to it later with new ideas or aspects about it.

You can’t do this until you have a place to put these mental threads you plan to pull on later.

Don’t overthink it – there’s a lot of technology in this space, full of features you’ll never use. Just make sure you have some system for capturing an idea and getting back to it later.

Be Curious

We live in an age where almost everything is “knowable.” So, refuse to not know something.

You don’t have to be an expert on everything, but never ignore something in your industry that you don’t understand. If you keep hearing people talk about something, look into it until the fog parts slightly and you at least have some context of what they’re talking about. Make sure you can put the thing into context.

A big part of thought leadership is making connections between disparate things. You can only do this if you have a broad base of knowledge and understanding.

Remember: it’s often enough to just know about something, without totally understanding it. You can look into something enough to be able to know why it exists and what people use it for. Most of the time, that’s all you need.

Be Authentic

I’ve always felt that pretension only goes so far, and you can’t fool people forever. If you posture and try to be something you’re not, eventually you’ll be found out.

You will usually always be hired by people who are smarter than you. These people will see through exaggerations, half-truths, and hand-waving.

Remember that you don’t always have to be an expert. Feel free to just think out loud, without actually having an answer. Document your investigation. Talk about your mistakes. Admit that you don’t have the answer to something. Ask people who do have answers to get in touch.

Of the problems with posturing is that you’re going to be wildly, publicly, embarrassingly wrong at some point. If you’ve tried to create a persona where you’re a brilliant savant who always magically sees what others don’t, then the fall will be painful, and your credibility will be slow to recover. Always be humble enough to leave open the possibility that you’re not the most important voice in the room.

Over the long term, the only reasonable plan is to be honest and authentic. The world doesn’t need anything other than that, and despite what you think, you probably can’t pull it off anyway.