Success Advice
How To Become An Expert In Anything
“I want to be an expert in my field.”
Congratulations! So does everyone else. If you look inside yourself and find the confidence, then you’ll have what you need to become an expert at anything.
The problem is that so many of us don’t believe we have what it takes to achieve greatness.
Being an expert starts with a belief in yourself, not information or accreditation.
“I’m not trying to sound like Oprah or get you to hold hands with me and sing hallelujah. Stop thinking you can’t be an expert. You can. All of us can”
A belief in yourself is how you started. Starting with believing you can do it is what gives you self-approval to learn the tools you’re missing to be an expert. None of us are born experts.
We believe in ourselves, learn, fail and keep at it until suddenly, like magic, everyone calls us an expert. Believing in ourselves reminds me of a movie about a young stockbroker called Chris Gardner.
He had no money, no education and no connections in the investment world. People fall for the delusion after watching the movie that seeing a successful stockbroker who was driving a Ferrari is what changed Chris and made him an expert in stocks later on in life.
This idea is BS. No fancy car or mentor made Chris an expert. He believed in himself first before ever being inspired by a man in a suit and a chunk of metal with a Ferrari badge on it. He would have never met this mentor who helped him unless he believed in himself.
The reason we don’t believe we are an expert already.
Is because we are chasing rainbows and fantasizing about wads of cash instead of knowing that even the experts started in last place.
All of us have a little bit more knowledge about an area of life. We may not be at the expert level, but we are a few levels ahead of someone else at at least one thing.
The lesson here is understanding that being an expert requires you to start somewhere. That somewhere could be in the middle of the pack or one spot in front of last place.
You just need a better level of skill or knowledge than a small number of people. Those people are the ones you assist, teach and inspire.
The feedback you get from this group is what will eventually get you to the expert level.
We miss executing because of…
Never getting started. The person that becomes the expert gets started today. They don’t wait until they reach a certain level of success.
They don’t wait for resources or a team or anything.
“Becoming an expert is essentially being willing to start with nothing”
It’s the idea of building Rome one step at a time rather than waiting for the city to be built for you, riding into Rome on a chariot on the day of the last brick being laid, and saying “I’m going to start today!”
No one respects that type of wannabe hero who waits for the right time.
It’s never the right time to become an expert so you may as well get started now.
We have to do it.
Everything you need to become an expert at anything has to start with you. You have to do the work.
In the outsourced world we live in, we expect everyone else to deliver the outcomes that we need to become an expert. We think we can become an expert by delegating everything to a third party.
If you take this approach from the start, you’ll never gain the experience you need to become an expert in the first place. It’s the process of doing it alone in the beginning that makes us an expert later on.
We all hate listening to a so-called “expert” who has never been in the trenches and got their hands dirty. They teach using concepts learned out of books that are mostly fantasies rather than from hard work and experience.
Expert status comes from confidence.
The way I like to describe it is that once you choose the area you want to be an expert in, you get there by using confidence.
I started investing in social media a long time ago. I failed for a long time while I watched friends, colleagues, etc. build their empires. I feared that I had missed out on the big opportunity.
I realized later when I did become an expert that the opportunity had only just begun.
The confidence I had to teach others about social media even though I hadn’t got to all-star status yet myself was what allowed me to become an expert eventually. I stood in front of people with the confidence that I knew something and was not far off from being an expert.
I told myself “I don’t have to be an expert to deliver value in some form. I can still be useful to others using my current amateur status.”
Getting in the deep end will get you to expert status faster.
“A little hack you can use if you want to be an expert in anything faster is to gain leverage on yourself”
You do this by accepting an opportunity that requires an expert when you’re only halfway in your own mind to becoming one.
Saying yes to an opportunity that requires an expert forces you to learn the skills and knowledge faster to deliver on your expert promise. Leverage creates momentum every single time.
Final thought.
If we don’t expect to be an expert on day one, and we’re comfortable to get started without the expert status, we’ll eventually get what we seek.
The word ‘expert’ is more of a perception than a black and white idea that you either “are” or “are not” an expert.
You can be an expert in anything starting right now.