Patterns Of Authority

Thanks to a social media shout-out from a super fan of the show, we decided to dig deeper into his favorite episode: The Path to Authority.  We wanted to explore the specific patterns that can power your move from freelancer to expert to authority.

Jonathan and I walk you through the signs that you’re building authority in your area of expertise:

You’re spending considerable time thinking, writing, speaking, publishing and socializing your point of view.

You discover the forms of publishing that fit with your talents and audience and produce regularly, no matter what.

You’re building a niche that not only allows you to charge more for your specialty, but gives you the ideal audience to continually feed your curiosity and work from your genius zone.

You’re positioning your business and expertise in white space—a target market that you don’t share with anyone else.

You’re building a business model with seductive levels of flexibility: what and how you charge; how much and how often you work; and a suite of leveraged services and products that optimize how you spend your time.

Quotables

“If you are renting your hands out by the hour to do tasks for your clients, it can be difficult to carve out time (to build authority). That feels un-billable, it feels like you’re losing money.”—JS

“Authorities have a point of view: what is your belief system about how your expertise impacts your world?”—RM

“Freelancers are basically selling their hands where authorities are selling their brains. It’s all about the intellectual property.”—JS

“Obviously you can make a lot of money specializing, but in addition to that, you really can go where your curiosity takes you.”—RM

“Since I’ve got a daily deadline to publish something…for a bunch of people who are waiting for it, my brain will gravitate to what I should consider for that vs. thinking about say what should I wear tomorrow.”—JS

“If you’re looking for ways to prime the (authority building) pump…read!”—RM

“Writing is like the sort of cohesive, coherent long form. It’s the crucible almost that you go through to bake your idea into something.”—JS

“A lot of us need to socialize things with other people to really get at all the things in the dusty corners of our brains.”—RM