Struggling to find your breakthrough idea?

“I add value in a lot of places, but I struggle to see what I’m most excellent at. I know there’s a pure gem buried inside of me. If I could find the one thing that’s most valuable to the world, that shows I go against the grain, I’d double or triple down on that.”

I regularly hear some version of that when I speak with clients, prospects, friends, or readers.

Consultants who sell their expertise.

They’re looking for what I call Disruptive Wisdom.

Disruptive Wisdom means interesting, contrarian insights and stories. It’s new takes on old principles.

The currency of every Undisputed Authority in their field.

But they’re struggling to find it.

And when I contrast those who have it with those who do not, a pattern emerges.

Before I explain that pattern, though, we need to revisit The MIT door experiment.

Three doors on a screen. Behind each door, there’s real cash. You only have 100 clicks to open the doors, each with a different payout range.

The MIT students immediately figured out the best strategy: Check each of the three doors and keep opening the same one with the highest rewards.

But then a new visual feature was introduced:

“We're randomising the rewards behind each door after each click. If you don’t open the other doors, they’ll start shrinking and eventually disappear.”

The experiment was geared to ensure that, regardless which door you picked, if you continued to open the same door, you'd get a greater total value of rewards than if you kept switching doors.

But even though participants should have ignored the warning, they couldn’t bear the pain of seeing the other two doors disappear. So they started wasting clicks to reopen them, and their earnings dropped 15 per cent.

But why would they do that?

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dan Ariely says.

This principle is the root cause of all our marketing problems

In the first experiment, there’s no uncertainty and no anxiety over lost opportunity.

Life would be a breeze if you worked in an environment like that.

If I looked into my crystal ball and told you your one thing to write about, and that if you wrote about it consistently for the next 12 months, you'd become the David C. Baker of your industry, you'd do it. You'd focus on it, read around it, and build an audience around it. There'd be no more hesitation or second-guessing.

You’ve got the smarts and work ethic. That’s not your problem.

The challenge is this gnawing doubt—"What if I picked the wrong door?"

And with that doubt, we hesitate. We hedge our bets. We broaden our offer, the subjects we talk about, and the people we serve. In doing so, we blend into the crowd.

The trouble is, in any expert business, the following is true:

“Good nonfiction [is] … a chance to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff that most of us don’t have a chance to do in our daily lives.” David Foster Wallace

Wallace talks about nonfiction here, but this 100% applies to the thought leadership content that lifts a consultant from a respected expert to Undisputed Authority.

You cannot find your one diamond idea that'll stand alone, that you can build influence around, until you pick a door and stick with it, going far deeper on a specific topic (in a specific market) than others are prepared to go.

Every authority you admire has done that.

They developed the discipline to close all other doors, pick one, walk through it, and not turn back. In doing so, they collect far more concentrated data than their peers.

And Disruptive Wisdom comes from data

I study Undisputed Authorities and work with a few, too. What I find is that Disruptive Wisdom comes from observations of a specific dataset.

There are typically three sources of data:

1. An expert chooses their 'door', works on a specific problem with a particular group of people over a period of time, observes patterns, and subsequently writes about what they observe. The data is derived from experience. That's people like David C. Baker and April Dunford.
2. An expert develops their own primary data and builds insights around that unique dataset. You see this a lot in SaaS, where a company sells a product that collects proprietary data, which the company uses to develop insightful content. Patrick Campbell did that with subscription pricing at Profitwell.
3. The third is secondary data. An expert collects secondary data related to a specific subject and then analyses, commentates, and sometimes critiques it. That's what Growth Design do. They collect product UI, tell us (the non-experts) what's good and what's not, and then tell us why it's good (psychologically backed principles).

You see that the data doesn’t have to be unique.

It needs to be you looking at a problem (and it's solution) greater than anyone else is prepared to, applying your analysis to a specific scenario or market where others are not. And even if others are doing this, if you do the work, you’ll develop your own unique perspective that differentiates you from the others.

And to become recognised as an expert in that field, it takes less time than you'd think

Because so few people are prepared to observe one problem and write about it for a sustained period of time.

But, to go deep enough to find Disruptive Wisdom, you have to pick a door and stick with it.

Blair Enns talks about this in The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. You state your position before you're the expert in it, and only when you state it can you become the expert (by doing the work outlined above).

That never happens if you keep restating your position and picking completely new doors.

I'm convinced that if you're struggling to find your gem, the root cause lies here.