Passion, Expertise and Authority by Christopher Tracy
February 5, 2013 by Dr. Letitia Wright
Filed under A Note for You, Front Page
As with many business stories we hear about in Success magazine, and Inc Magazine, the word “passion” is thrown around as if it’s the very foundation for business success.
“Passion” is the media darling for successful startup stories. We hear people like Seth Godin talk about it. Brian Tracy swears by it. Tim Feriss thinks it’s a bonus to have.
Imran Md Ali, who is our featured guest of the month, shares with us his understanding of the word “passion” in the context of entrepreneurship.
Imran is a co-author of Kaizen Business Principles with the legendary Brian Tracy (www.BrianTracy.com) and also author of 2 other books, The 10 Step Marketing Formula and Creating Marketing Breakthroughs, which are available at Amazon and also Barnes and Noble.
In an interview with Imran, he shares with us why passion is the core foundation for business success, and why passion alone will not be sufficient to ensure success.
There are two things which he says are needed, on top of passion alone in order to succeed. The first, is Genuine Domain Expertise.
Genuine Domain Expertise is simply being a real expert in whatever niche or industry you’re in. So if you’re in the restaurant marketing industry, the definition of an expert in Imran’s dictionary, is “someone who is in the top 5 percentile in terms of knowledge in restaurant marketing.”
It simply means that you have to keep learning, and gravitate towards the top of your class (or niche)
This, according to Imran, will give you a platform to operate from. People prefer to work with experts, and experts get paid more for less work too. The reason for this is because we are living in world where expertise is rewarded, and generality is punished with mediocre pays and prospects for jobs.
Here are 2 tips Imran gives to establish instant expertise.
1) Read up for one hour each day, about a topic in your market. At the end of the year, you’d have read about 400 hours worth of material and this should allow you to establish your expertise.
2) After reading, aim to apply your new-found knowledge for free as practise for clients. So if you’re a relationship guru, give away your advice for free in the beginning to practise what you have just read. This concretizes your new found knowledge.
Another aspect of passion would be authority.
Now, in a world where everyone claims to be an expert of some sort, you’d have to climb further, harder, and longer than the rest to establish yourself as a real authority in your marketplace.
Imran Md Ali shares some of the things you can do to establish authority
1) First, get some media coverage. Media coverage is a quick path to endorsed authority. Why? We have, as consumers, been trained to trust the media. How do you get media, you might ask?
Imran advises you to create a newsworthy angle. Get a PR expert to write up a press release, and send it out to all local news channels and magazines/papers. A reporter would inevitably find your story interesting enough to feature it.
Once you have gotten this initial exposure, snowball it by approaching other media sources and showing that you have been featured before. Keep on creating news angles that the media would love and try to be a media darling, and this would pay off in the long term.
2)Secondly, create a blog or website that showcases your past and current work. This is a site that allows you to store your bragging rights. State your achievements on this page and don’t be shy about it at all.
This way, when someone Googles for your name, your blog will appear and they can find out more about you- And the best part is, your website says only the good things about you!
That’s it then. Two things accompany passion, and those are 1) Expertise and 2) Authority
Apply what you have learnt and you will soon be on your way to dominating your industry or marketplace.
Guest Interview written by Christopher Tracy, CEO of CLT Holding and Imran’s marketing client in 2011.