It all starts with the awareness of the Experts that they are not everything they need to be to create the change that they seek in the world. And how the only path forward is to become better in their field of expertise.
Expertise is a journey that starts with the socialization and education processes that we have all been part of, but for most people the journey ends within the first 5 years of their corporate job. At their core, one of the values that separate experts from the rest of people is their courage and commitment to play an infinite game that is won by the quality of their inputs rather than outcomes that the work produces.
The Journey to Expertise is based up the idea that to close the gap between the experts current and ideal selves, the only way through is by:
“Doing work that matters, for people that care about the change in the world that you are trying to make”.
Seth Godin (paraphrased definition of Marketing).
The title of this framework was born out of Seth Godin’s definition of marketing. Each word opens the opportunity to explore and come up with a blueprint to address the day-to-day problems that must be solved as an expert that is on a journey to become more than what they are.
- Doing work that matters: this opens the conversation about one of the biggest problems that experts face when trying to generate revenue from the exercising on their expertise, which is the definition of what’s good. Implicitly, this statement acknowledges the existence of a hierarchy of competency and inevitably, our current expertise sits somewhere in that hierarchy.
- For people that care: having been trained as an engineer for almost 10 years, my default problem solving scheme is a convergent to a single solution one. When interacting with the world, experts in the later stages of their journey tend to be ruthless about the scope of the problem they are solving. They have learned that the world doesn’t need another undifferentiated service provider, they’ve learned that solving a problem for a specific person, group or sector of a market will allow them to 1) have access to enough data points to generate the insights necessary to 2) create the processes and systems that will deliver value to such individuals, groups or market sectors.
- The change in the world you are trying to make: this section speaks to the value of creating as many interactions as possible with the “market” to generate the data to define what a better world would look like for the individuals, groups or market sector that you are exercising your expertise for. It speaks back to the previously mentioned core value of an expert: to focus on the quality and volume of the inputs in the short term to create the best solution for our chosen market, to achieve market fit from a product management point of view[1].
The Journey to Expertise stands on four pillars: 1) Intellectual Property Creation 2) Ecosystem of Revenue 3) Tribes and Networks 4) Contextual Content at Scale.
Intellectual Property Creation
After the initial shock of how much distance there is between the current self of the expert and the ideal expert that could bring to reality the change they are trying to make in the to the world is acknowledged, and how much work it would take to become that ideal, the Intellection Property Generation System provides a systems that will guide the day to day actions that little by little, starting from the smallest and highest probability of achievement action, will help the experts create an “Intellectual Property” that differentiate them from the rest of the competition in their market.
This part of the Journey To Expertise framework begins with a technical expert’s commitment to becoming better. Regardless of if you are starting from zero in a given technical field or if you have already accumulated some expertise in a such field, at some point, besides the currently available knowledge available, in order to develop better skills, the expert needs to have access to more valuable problems. Problems that can both increase the experts’ technical skills or obtain knowledge that will improve the definition of how their skills are or can become a better fit to obtain a higher position in the technical competence hierarchy in their field.
To gain access to these problems, the expert must gain the trust of the problem’s gatekeepers for them to allow them the opportunity to exercise their expertise at a profit that will allow the expert to keep improving their Intellectual Property.
At this point is worth noting the distinction between Technical Expertise and Intellectual Property. In short, Technical Expertise is what you do, is what someone would google when looking for services like yours, what you would put in a resume. I define Intellectual Property as a positioning exercise that includes the collection of:
- Data generation system and the database of all the meaningful interaction of your technical expertise with the market that are relevant for you to become better at your expertise
- The analysis frameworks are used to process the data that is collected to generate the insights about your current expertise market fit
- The processes and systems that are continuously improved that are used to delivery more value to the experts target market
We have all heard the phrase: “you need to build a brand”, this comment falls short as it doesn’t include the execution part of what your reputation is based upon. In my opinion is at best an incomplete description of the social media influencer phenomenon that overtook the mass media advertisement industry in the early 2010’s.
[1] During my years as a Reservoir Engineer, I was lucky to have worked with incredibly smart people and kind people, true experts in their fields and overall great humans. One of these was someone that became the Chief Geologist of the company. On Fridays’ afternoons, I often used to have my mid-afternoon coffee with her to either wait for my simulations to finish running or to get some human interaction after being focused on a screen for way too many hours.
