What Does It Take to Become a Real Expert in a Given Field?
When all is said and done, no one really wants to be an “amateur” in their profession — even if that profession only entails part-time and relatively low-skilled work. For the especially ambitious, however, the idea of being “mediocre” at what they do may well seem like a fate worse than death. Becoming an expert is what you want to achieve high levels of success.
To feel like your professional life has been developing well, and like you’re achieving something meaningful in your job, you need to be moving in the direction of greater competency and expertise. It’s when only a handful of people can do what you can do that you have job security, and are likely to enjoy a high degree of satisfaction and confidence in your professional life.
By contrast, if someone can come in off your street and, in a week, learn to do your job as well as you, you’re not in a great situation.
So, what does it take to become a real expert in a given field? Here are some ideas.
Single-minded focus and concentration
Studies consistently show that when people try to “multitask” they not only fail to get more done, but they also perform to a significantly lower standard than people who maintain single-minded focus and concentration on the task at hand.
Somewhat comically — the people who believe they’re best able to multitask seem to actually be the ones who do it the worst, according to some research.
To become an expert in a field, you cannot adopt a “multitasking” mindset. You need single-minded focus in a couple of different ways.
First, you need to make your field of interest a core priority in your life. If it’s one of 10 things you split your time and energy between equally, you will likely never become an expert in it.
Secondly, you need to concentrate when you’re working on deepening your skills in that area. You can’t listen to YouTube talks in the background.
A laser like focus is key to building a successful business and achieving results. You’ll want to have a rhino mindset to succeed in business. Learn more about developing a success mindset in my post on having a rhino state of mind here.
A book I’d recommend checking out as well is Rhinoceros Success. Check out the current price over on Amazon here.
A commitment to incremental and perpetual growth and improvement
Becoming an expert isn’t about working like a maniac for a month and then slacking off. It’s not the kind of thing you’ll achieve in a handful of days, or a handful of weeks, and maybe not even in a handful of years.
The only way to become an expert is to commit to incremental and perpetual growth and development. You take small and repeated steps every single day, in order to become better at what you do, by at least a fraction here and there.
The key is that you never get to stop moving forward. Landed a good corporate position? Great. Now maybe it’s time to look into a business intelligence MBA program.
Another aspect of continual improvement is the daily habit of personal development. Your success will only grow to the point that you do, so you’ll need to focus on becoming the best you possible.
A great book on this concept of daily improvement is the Slight Edge. Check out the current price on Amazon here.
You may also enjoy checking out my post on the top personal development books that can change your life and business here.
The willingness to make mistakes and learn from them, rather than avoiding action and risk
It’s impossible to become an expert in anything if you refuse to engage with the subject, take action, and expose yourself to failure and shortcoming.
In business and in life, it’s often your cumulative failures on the road towards a goal that teach you the most valuable lessons, and that build you into a competent expert.
If, on the other hand, you avoid risk and engagement at all cost, and endlessly ruminate and hypothesis instead, you’re not on the path of mastery, or success.
Failure is one of life’s best teachers. It’s never about what happens to you, it’s how do you respond to what happens that makes the difference.
A great book on failure as a means to success is Failing Forward by John C. Maxwell. Pick up a copy on Amazon here!
Follow the concept of experience, improve, teach
Another way to become an expert in your chosen field over time is the concept of experience, improve, teach. The foundation of this is experiencing or actually taking action in your field.
This could mean making sales calls, developing content, making sales funnels, doing sales presentations, among other things. The foundation of developing any skill is actually performing it.
Theory and book learning is great, and should certainly be a part of your journey of becoming an expert, but it shouldn’t be the only way you learn and grow. Experience is often one of the best teachers.
The next step is actually improving upon your skills. This can happen through reading good books, listening to audio programs, attending seminars, and taking courses. There is so much information at your fingertips, you almost have to try and avoid it to not learn something new.
A great way to improve is through matching and modeling. Find someone who has what you want, do what they do and you can get what they’ve got. Finding mentors is a large part of improving your results.
The great thing is, you don’t need to learn from just one mentor. You can find mentors and fellow experts in many areas you want to improve in. Take what you can learn from each and apply them in all aspects of your business.
Finally to establish your expert status you want to teach what you are learning to others. Teaching someone how to do something is often one of the best ways to increase your expertise. Many people can do something, but when it comes to teaching someone else they struggle.
Mastering sharing your skills with others, will hone your skills as well.
How to earn income as an expert
Your income will be dictated by the value you bring to the marketplace. This is a very powerful concept and holds true if you are looking to earn income with your expertise.
There are many ways to bring value to the marketplace, but a few options I’d recommend are blogging, social media marketing, and email marketing. These strategies can all work in conjunction with each other, but they can be done separately as well.
Blogging is a great foundation strategy to earn income as an expert. First is that you own it. Social media marketing is great, but you don’t fully control those platforms like you do a blog.
A blog is also searchable content and allows you to capitalize on SEO marketing. Each time you make a new blog post, it is like another billboard for SEO to bring highly targeted traffic to your expert site. You can make content once and it can continue to bring in traffic, leads, and sales for your business.
Overtime this can compound and be generating a significant income for yourself on autopilot. If you’d like to learn more about how to make money blogging check out my post here.
Becoming an expert with social media marketing
Social media is another powerful resource to develop your expert status. As your following grows on social media, more people will take your content seriously.
There are 3 foundations to developing expert status through social media, and they are building your audience, engaging your audience and finally selling to your audience.
This means you want to continually be connecting with people in your niche and target market. I’d recommend a least 10 new connections a day on social media. This will allow you the luxury of never running out of people to talk to about what you promote.
Also create engaging content on an ongoing basis. People do business with those that they know, like, and trust. By putting out a steady stream of value based content on social media it will develop that relationship with your audience.
Finally you can sell to your social media audience. People often make the mistake of focusing on this step first, rather than last. With the authority, credibility, and relationship you develop as an expert with building, and engaging, selling becomes much easier.
If you’d like to learn more about becoming an expert through social media marketing, I’d recommend checking out the book Expert Secrets. You can actually pick up a copy of Expert Secrets for free here!
Build a list you are an expert with through email marketing
Another place you can become an expert is through your email list and email marketing. The money is in the list, and email marketing can help you develop the expert status quickly.
There is also massive leverage with email marketing and tools like an email autoresponder. For example with an email autoresponder you can write one email that could go out to thousands if not tens of thousands of targeted leads at once.
It could take years to try and individually reach out to each person, but with email marketing and an email autoresponder you can do it in a few minutes. Your job with email marketing is to continue to provide value on an ongoing basis.
Doing this will establish your expert status and allow you to promote offers as well. Each time you write a new valuable email blast, it develops just a little more of your expert status.
This makes promoting and selling your offers that much more effective. If you’d like to learn how to start building your email list fast, check out my post on how to grow your email list fast!
Also if you don’t yet have an email autoresponder set up for your business, I’d recommend checking out Aweber. You can check it out free for 30 days as well here!
Follow the steps in this blog post and your expert status will be established in no time!
Did This Blog Help You? If so, I would greatly appreciate if you could comment below and share on Facebook
Facebook: facebook.com/coachmikemacdonald
Email: [email protected]
Considering Starting a Home Business?
Check out my Work With Mike Section
“I help coachable and teachable professionals become Financially Free and Live Full Time! Helping you create a better tomorrow through a better you!”
P.S. If you don’t yet have an affiliate marketing business, but would like to learn how to start one and make money from home, CLICK HERE
If you enjoyed this post on What Does It Take for becoming an Expert in a Given Field, please retweet and comment below
