True Thought Leadership Revolves Around This 1 Practice
Say you’re a young entrepreneur.
You’ve got the drive, the grit, the determination to bring one of your (many) ideas to life. You minored in entrepreneurship in college and your buddy — who you’re starting a business with — studied accounting and finance. You feel you’ve got all the tools you need to succeed. The only thing you lack, is experience.
Nonetheless, you’re confident that what you learned in the classroom will translate to life as an entrepreneur — you didn’t take out all of those student loans for nothing.
But in your first 3-months of launching your startup, business is slow. At the 6-month mark, there is little improvement. You pull up your professor’s old lecture slides buried somewhere in your downloads and look to see what you’re doing wrong. Your friend decides the entrepreneurship life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and goes back to work at their former position. The money you set aside to last you through your first year as a founder is starting to run dry as your company is getting ready to celebrate it’s first birthday.
Soon enough, you’re back in your parents basement (if you aren’t there already), editing your resumé spending most of your time on Glassdoor and LinkedIn looking for a new position.
What went wrong?
Well, let’s answer that question with another question:
If you wanted to perfect kicking a soccer ball, would you rather learn from your high school soccer coach, or Lionel Messi?
The answer is clear.
If you want to be successful in any industry, you need to pay attention to that industry’s thought leaders.
And when I say ‘thought leader,’ I don’t mean reading every article about Jeff Bezos and Mark Cuban you can get your hands on. Of course they’re smart people, but that’s who every young entrepreneur is looking at. And odds are, most of the content you’re going find about them isn’t going to come directly from them. Find thought leaders who are consistently contributing to the conversations taking place in their industry.
Real thought leaders influence others through story-telling.
If you want to learn about something — anything — you need to look for credible candidates who are active in their industry.
Piggybacking off of my earlier question, who would you rather learn about marketing from: your college marketing professor or directly from the CEO of a marketing agency?
One has real-life marketing experience while the other, more often than not, doesn’t — or at least not to the same extent.
I work at a thought leadership agency called Digital Press where we focus on helping our clients — CEOs, serial entrepreneurs, C-level executives — establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry through story-telling, building relationships at scale.
Our CEO and founder Nicolas Cole has spent the past decade perfecting the art of online writing, sharing his own trials and tribulations as an entrepreneur-in-the-making. His formula has garnered 50+ million views, 4x Top Writer status on Quora, his own column on Inc. Magazine, a spot at Forbes Top 25 Marketing Influencer list, and has been featured in nearly every major publication (TIME, Business Insider, Fortune, to name a few).
And that’s exactly the process we use for each of our clients.
In the past 18 months, we’ve grown from 2 to 20+ full-time employees and have 75+ clients around the world.
Through Cole’s process, we have been able to boost clients’ public presence — many of them having their stories picked up by major publications like Forbes, Inc., and TIME. Our goal is to establish them as thought leaders in their industry by helping them share their personal stories with as many people as possible.
And it’s working.
People want to learn from leaders — and it makes sense. Why study to become an entrepreneur when you can learn directly from someone who has done it themselves?
The best way leaders influence others is through sharing stories, contributing to their industry, and establishing themselves as thought leaders throughout the process.
