Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
I ended the last article sharing my deadline of February 2024. One last push to make it as a solo consultant because up until then, I’d been failing.
My confidence was shot, my mental health eroded, and my bank balance depleted.
The decisions I make next completely change the trajectory of my life.
I'll share what happens next, but for any of this to make sense, I want to draw your attention to an observation I made.
Check out these reviews for a well-known audience-building course:
This is the course I took a few years back.
Back then, I saw reviews like this and thought, “Wow, this works.” These people have big numbers (which I can verify on social media), and they’re putting their success down to this audience-building course.
In retrospect, having gone through that ‘audience-building’ process, I look at the same reviews and see something completely different.
Notice: They rave about speed of follower growth but don’t imply that audience building helped them achieve any real business outcomes.
Also, that reviewer above with 450k followers, look at the types of posts that got him those followers.
Can you imagine a thought leader you truly admire writing posts like that?
Me neither.
The type of follower who likes and engages with that content makes you wonder, what’s a follower worth?
The answer depends on whether you’re an influencer or an authority.
This question leads me to another, which may seem out of place, but trust me, it’s relevant…
Turns out, late bloomers and early bloomers are wired differently.
At an early age, we’re all taught that if we do certain things we don’t enjoy, as instructed, we’ll be rewarded.
Memorise what you’re told to memorise, write how you’re told to write, go where you’re told to go. A-grades, pay rises, and promotions follow.
Early bloomers excel in that environment because they’re often extrinsically motivated. They thrive in this system because they’re driven by an external scoreboard.
They have the self-discipline to follow rules and do stuff they don’t want to, provided it consistently leads to measurable, outward-looking rewards.
They don’t like doing what they’re told just because someone told them to do it. They struggle to hold attention on anything that doesn’t interest them. They like following their own curiosities, getting obsessed along the way.
They don’t fit into existing systems, which is why they’re late bloomers.
It takes time, but they find their own path, often self-taught in many areas, pursuing mastery for the pure joy of mastering a task or area of expertise.
All of which explains why so many smart, talented consultants struggle to build any traction or consistency to create content.
When they ‘play the game’ the right way, algorithms reward the user.
Those example posts I shared above from the B2B influencer, let me remind you of one:
“10 free websites that are so valuable they feel illegal to ignore.”
An intrinsically motivated person gags at the thought of putting their name to that sentence in public.
An extrinsically motivated person looks at the 343k likes that post received and says, “How do I get me some of that?”
Almost all the advice on ‘how to grow a personal brand’ comes from extrinsically motivated people - B2B influencers.
For those folks, it works. Play the social media game according to its rules and you build follower numbers, fast.
Here’s the catch though…
My guess is you’re intrinsically motivated.
That doesn’t mean you don’t like money or recognition, but it does mean you care a lot about how you achieve both.
Thought leaders are intrinsically motivated. They follow their curiosities, get obsessed, and typically focus on one particular area of work for ten years+.
A few of the people I admire and consider to be authorities: Seth Godin, Louis Grenier, Bernadette Jiwa, April Dunford, David C. Baker, Lucy Werner, Joe Pullizi, Billy Broas, Nigel Green, Blair Enns, Austin Kleon, Andre Chaperon, Annie Duke.
All high profile, all attract thousands of fans and paying clients.
How?
It comes down to one principle. Intrinsically motivated people win when…
I’m intrinsically motivated, but during this audience-building phase, I was playing the game for extrinsically motivated people. The influencer game.
David C. Baker becomes a thought leader because he writes down 52 topics related to his business, then writes a long-form article each month developing unique opinions on each.
He does that for 4.5 years.
Later, he wrote The Business of Expertise, which cements him as the one of one when it comes to agency positioning.
It’s a slow burner.
Obsession and patience are required to develop mastery and knowledge. He explores his own curiosities relative to his work and develops interesting perspectives that grate against commonly held truths.
But in order to do all of the above, we need to be aware of this danger:
Mass passive engagement [is] where people are funnelled toward an aesthetic or a mode that works for the most people at once… The kind of culture that the algorithmic ecosystem ends up promoting is that widest possible average. It’s the stuff that avoids alienating people, keeps you engaged as much as possible, even if that engagement is very shallow. It’s fundamentally scalable - Kyle Chayka
You have taste. You know who you are, what you like, and have the ability to curate the movies, music, and writing that you think of as good.
It’s a compass.
Your years of experience, personally and professionally, have earned you this innate ability.
But the trust we each have in our own taste is fragile, and for many of us, social media erodes it.
It makes us question what ‘good’ is. "This fluff got 10,000 likes. Has the world gone mad or am I missing something?"
Influencers feed the beast.
They give the social platforms the generic content algorithms crave and pump, and in return, they earn shallow engagement.
But, if you’re a consultant, shallow engagement is worthless. You need prospective clients to devour what you have to say, love it, then make an enquiry with the view of spending thousands of dollars with you.
Thought leaders excel where many of us fail because they’re focused
They have this ability to ignore the algorithms. They have an unwavering faith in their own ability to discern good from bad, regardless of engagement metrics.
I’m sure they have moments of doubt, but that doesn’t influence their obsessive pursuit to follow their own curiosity and solve the problems important to them (which they document in their writing and speaking).
And yes, they post on LinkedIn, but they don’t post for LinkedIn.
Influencers are born on social media, thought-leaders are not.
I’ll share more on that in the next email, but for now, understand:
April Dunford and Dorie Clark didn’t build their brand, thinking, or fans on social media. They did it elsewhere, through other means. Social media reinforced their growth and supported it, but that comes later.
Which brings me back to that dark November evening. I’ve got four months to make this work.
When I set that deadline, I realise something…
The hacks, the audience-building courses, the stop-start nature on social media…
All symptoms of a person who doesn’t trust their own ability to make something good.
I was acting as if I wasn’t capable of becoming a thought leader. Like I needed to cheat my way there. That I needed to build an audience fast before I ran out of money.
I’d built an audience of 17.5k and it was doing nothing for my consulting business.
If I was going to become an authority, attract good clients through content, I needed to start behaving like one.
Well, now I had a February 2024 deadline:
“If by the end of that February, I hadn’t picked up at least one good client doing the work I wanted to do, with a price tag to cover our monthly bills, I’d stop everything and start applying for jobs.”
This time, I’m going to prepare for success. I’m going to make something that a thought leader would. I’m going to trust my taste, make something I believe is valuable, and see where that takes me.
I call this approach Curiosity-Driven Insight.
P.S. The parts on Early Bloomers v Late Bloomers was taken from David Brooks fantastic article in The Atlantic
Want to become a thought leader?
Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
