You know I love working with “visionaries” — people with big ideas, a vision for the future, and an inclination for questioning the status quo.
This summer, I’ve started working with a few of my favorite kind of visionaries: people with big ideas, mazes of frameworks and best practices in their brains, years of experience to back it all up, but no experience publishing or sharing those ideas publicly.
They’re people who have earned their experience doing the work and carving out their unique perspective.
I can spot this kind of visionary in the first few minutes of a conversation. And I’ve noticed a trend: People with the longest list of GREAT ideas can also be the most reticent about starting to share them. They want to get their message *exactly* right. They know their industry forward and backward, and they want to make sure their public thought leadership perfectly reflects what they know. They want to be perfect, and that often means not publishing anything at all.
If you’re not used to sharing your ideas in public — whether it’s in tweets, LinkedIn posts, magazine articles, blog posts, ebooks, email newsletters, quick videos, you name the format — taking the first step and starting to share can feel like a monumental move.
I find myself pushing these visionaries to start sharing. My message to them: Practice is more important than polish. The more comfortable you can get sharing your ideas, the better you’ll get at doing it.
I see these visionaries (often the ones with the best, most important, most unique ideas!) holding themselves back. They’re their own worst enemy. They let perfect be the enemy of done.
But I know that even a rough draft of their ideas — their notes scribbled out — would be helpful to so many people.
Here’s an example. I recently started working with an incredibly dynamic, sharp, fascinating leader. She’s consulting in a really interesting niche, and her message for her clients is unique and timely.
But none of her ideas are available online. She has a flat, never-updated web presence, and in her words, she’s “not into social media.”
So how would anyone know what she’s thinking? How can prospects preview her perspective? How would anyone find her and be carried along by the force of her convincing arguments?
They can’t and they won’t — not unless she starts telling people what she’s thinking.
She came to me and said, “I need to put out SO MUCH content. How can I even start?”
We get obsessed with the idea of “content” and make long lists of all the content we need to create. But people don’t want content. They want to know what you’re thinking. They want help developing their own thinking. They want answers. They want your current perspective.
In her case, I’m pushing her to stop thinking about social media as an angry beast to feed, and start thinking about it as an easy, free tool to tell people what she’s thinking.
If you’re sitting on good ideas, start testing them out. Get your ideas out there. Don’t let polish win out over practice.
