Death to Thought Leaders
There’s a really gross, creepy, ugly, stupid, annoying, and ridiculous trend among people who’ve just begun to write about things on the internet. They call themselves “thought leaders” even though (1) nobody follows them and (2) their thoughts aren’t worth following.
If you have ever referred to yourself as a “Thought Leader,” that’s okay. Forgive yourself. We all make mistakes. I’ll probably make at least 10 today. One of those mistakes will be publishing this piece.
(By the way, I have to put “thought leader” inside those sterile quotations because otherwise I might touch them and get their gross “thought leader” germs. Yuck.)
So just forgive yourself, and then let it go. You don’t need to be a thought leader. Maybe one day you’ll achieve that status, but it hasn’t happened yet.
You don’t get to call yourself a “thought leader.” That title is something that other people bestow upon you.
For example, Sir Ian McKellan didn’t become a knight just because one day he wrote KNIGHT in his Medium byline. The queen of fucking England gave him that title.
So what you need to do is to wait for the queen of fucking Medium to call you a “thought leader.” Until then, just stop it.
The Hard Part
Everybody wants to be a thought leader because that’s the easy part. The hard part is becoming an Execution Leader.
Knowing stuff doesn’t matter. I know how to say “I live in London” in Russian. Unfortunately that phrase has never helped me, and it’s not even true because I don’t live in London and I don’t speak Russian.
The only time knowledge has ever helped me was when I did something with that knowledge.
Your thoughts aren’t very interesting. Neither are mine. The only truly interesting thoughts are the ones that come from years of consistent execution.
Now let’s get as woo-woo as possible
Thoughts that come from your conscious attempt to understand a field are less interesting than the thoughts that come to you out of nowhere after you’ve been struggling in your field for years. If you know Pressfield, then you might predict why that is: The muses value execution above intelligence.
They don’t care how smart you are. They only care about the people who show up. If you don’t care about them, why should they care about you?
McDonald’s employees get fired if they don’t show up.
The muses will fire you if you don’t show up.
I can personally attest to this. I’m not just repeating some bullshit I read. My best ideas always come after I’ve spent at least a week really dedicating myself to a problem. After a few days of consistent practice — whether that’s research for my history podcast or focusing deeply on something related to my business — an idea will literally pop into my head. Out of nowhere.
If I come back the next day and keep up the pace, good things happen. Positive results actually multiply on top of each other. But if I don’t come back the day after, all my momentum dies. The muses (or whatever boring scientific dogshit term you would rather use) abandon me, and I have to start over from square one.
So if you spend 10 years diligently executing and executing and executing, maybe people will start calling you a thought leader. But by that point you will no longer care about meaningless titles.
And that’s so much better than being called a “thought leader.”
