Why you're not a thought leader (yet).

Raise your hand if you’re tired of hearing about people wanting to be thought leaders, wanting to demonstrate thought leadership on their blog, show their customers that their company has thought leaders in it.

That's what I thought.

You're tired because you hear incessant yammer about thought leadership...and then tumbleweeds. Or worse, blogs that rehash 2012 thinking with no angle, no new information, no value added. No leadership.

What’s preventing you from being a thought leader? I can tell you three reasons:

1. You don’t have leading thoughts

Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, eloquently explained what thought leaders have to do: have leading thoughts.

It’s really quite simple, and at the same time, very complicated. What are leading thoughts? How does a person have them? How do you become a thought leader?

If leading is the art of getting other people to willingly follow you, then leading thoughts are the key to that persuasion. They’re inspirational. They’re positive. They’re about a bright future. They’re about successful resolution. They’re about winning – together.

But they’re also a result of synthesizing a lot of information, from whatever field you’re in. This means thought leaders have to be well-read. Inventing the wheel every day is no fun – and incredibly disheartening and unnecessary. So thought leaders accept that maybe someone as smart as them has tried and failed before, and they’ll learn from that person’s experience. They understand they don’t have to personally live through every hard lesson for it to be effective.

If leading is the art of getting other people to willingly follow you, then leading thoughts are the key to that persuasion.

This revelation is really just another way of saying that thought leaders are critical thinkers. Not every idea is a good one, or even an average one deserving of attention and resources. Thought leaders say “no” a lot. But they say “yes” more. They understand that it is necessary to fail sometimes (but not all the time), because the only way to avoid failure all the time is to never try (which is perhaps the ultimate failure). Thought leaders seek out data that conflicts with their assumptions, and approach their own work like a skeptical advocate: ready to be won over, but not without some effort.

Thought leaders don’t necessarily need to have visionary, original ideas. Taking the work of other people and building something new from it, or applying a solution to a problem it was never intended to address, is how most inventions happen. Super Glue, for example, was invented as an emergency field dressing during the Vietnam War, to literally stick soldiers together until they could be treated properly. Leadership is found as much in ingenuity and willingness to try new things as it is in the inventiveness of Edison or Elon Musk.

2. You don’t have a point-of-view

If you don’t have a strong point of view, a solid philosophy about how your ideas (thoughts) can change the people around you, you’ll never be able to articulate it, much less influence anyone. Being bland is the enemy of a thought leader, no matter how brilliant their ideas are.

Think of any thought leader, and it doesn’t take too much digging to find someone who thinks they’re a jerk. Jobs, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg… They all believed to their core that their way was right. And that didn’t necessarily make other ways wrong, but they believed in their philosophy, in their goals, and in their ability to accomplish them their way. Opposing opinions didn’t matter because of the strength of belief each had in his philosophy and point of view.

A strong opinion, right or wrong, is a sign of self-belief. If your belief in yourself is indecisive, why would you expect anyone to follow that uncertainty?

This next idea is going to sting: maybe you’re not an expert. If you don’t have leading thoughts and you don’t have an unshakeable belief about the right way to do things, maybe it’s because you don’t know your way around the subject well enough. Of course, a rock-solid belief that you’re an expert in something you’re barely competent in is just as problematic for other reasons, but the world generally finds that kind of person out fairly quickly. Or they make him leader of the free world.

Like I mentioned earlier, being well-read (or even doing online classes or watching knowledgeable people on YouTube) is essential to challenging yourself and learning more about your field. Leadership is a position of lifelong learning: about the world, about your discipline, about people – and mostly about yourself.

3. You don’t say anything

Different from not saying anything interesting or valuable, there are thousands of thought leaders out there who go unnoticed day after day because they don't open their mouths to speak or they don't sit down and write.

If you’re not talking to people, a lot of people, sharing your philosophy and painting that picture of how good everything could be if/when people start using it as a design for life, you’re not leading.

People won’t follow you if they don’t know where you want to take them.

That’s why creating – whether that’s your own website or writing a book or writing guest posts for other people or YouTube videos or podcasting – is vitally important.

If you want to lead, you have to speak up. You have to be willing to walk your own talk, and talk about your journey, sometimes in very personal terms.

But creating is hard to do consistently. If you wait for your muse to prompt you, you might find yourself waiting a long time. Like any other skill, it takes discipline and commitment. Artist Christoph Niemann says, "You have to practice and become better. Every athlete, every musician practices every day." Because that's the level of self-accountability leadership takes.

Practice talking about your philosophy in your writing. Let people know, regularly, that you have things to say. Show (don't tell) them you’re an expert in your field. Write things that are helpful, that show your audience you’ve read around your subject and considered the pros and cons of a particular issue, and you have an opinion about it.

Because in the practice - in the thinking and doing about it - you’ll find your voice and your audience. You’ll find a following that looks up to you and asks: where to?

And you’ll be a leader.

Lead the way by connecting with me on LinkedIn and Twitter, I sometimes share interesting stuff. Click the share button so your connections see your leadership skills, and share your thoughts on thought leadership in the comments.