What Will You Be Best in the World at?
Can you find a small enough niche that you can become the world’s expert in four months? How would you approach letting the world know that you are the expert?
Kyle Forster Founder of RunWhen joined the Google Developer Group (GDG) Cloud Southlake virtual meetup to present AI and Modern Workflow Automation: Automating Runbooks.
I asked Kyle what career advice he would give his 20-year-old self. Here’s his answer. See a much longer answer further down.
Transcript from Bevy Labs:
Speaker 0: a beautiful question. As
Speaker 1: a shameless plug, well, I’m very proud of all the presentations that I’ve given
Speaker 2: Well, not all. I’m proud of about eighty percent of the presentations that I’ve given over the course of my professional career. There’s one that I’m really proud. I got invited to speak at the, at the Stanford entrepreneurial thought leader summit. It’s the most watched video that I’ve ever been a part of.
And it specifically was, like, career advice. I’ve gone back to watch it. It was me from twelve years ago. And I kinda laid out this, like, chapter by chapter and compared to the book. So shameless plug.
If you just, like, search for, like, Stanford entrepreneurial thought leaders and kind of horseshoe, it’ll come up.
Speaker 0: I don’t have anything better than that.
Speaker 2: But it’s really interesting as I look back on that. I now have Hunk of time after that, and I kinda have, like, another two chapters.
Speaker 0: Right. My
Speaker 2: biggest suggestion for people who are just getting started, and it shows up in, you know, with some really more pragmatic steps on how in that talk is become the world’s expert in something. If you pick your niche properly, becoming the world’s expert and a small enough niche, takes like three to four months, and then make a lot of people aware of the fact that you’re the world’s expert. And if you pick the wrong niche, Well, okay. So there’s six months to your life, but that’s not like that much. Like, just do it again.
Just really become the world’s expert. Try to become like the number one and then figure out ways for it to let a lot of people know that you’re the world’s expert. And then just repeat that cycle a couple of different times. The title of the talk is called a nonlinear path to leadership.
During our conversation, Kyle mentioned a longer career talk that he gave at his alma mater — Stanford:
