33: Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following with Dorie Clark

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot the Only Move that Matters Is yous Next One, which launches in September of 2016.

In this podcast, I talk with peak performers to reverse engineer their most successful career. Pivots interview experts on what it takes to be agile in a rapidly evolving economy and open the kimono on what happens behind the scenes of my book and business. You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear and uncertainty as the doorways of opportunity. My promise is that you will leave every episode with practical tips, tools and tactics. For show notes from this episode, visit jennyblake Me podcast.

If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Today's episode is a special one. It's an interview I conducted with my good friend Dorie Clark when her book Standout was coming out and even before I started writing Pivot. So it's a little bit of a throwback. You'll notice the mic quality isn't the same as it is today, so I hope you'll give a pardon on that. But the content was so great that I couldn't help but share it. And Dori has since become one of my very closest friends here in New York City. I hope you enjoy her and her amazing content content as much as I do.

Hi everyone. I am thrilled to be here with Dori Clark today, author of Stand how to find your breakthrough Idea and build a following around it. Dori is also the author of Reinventing Define youe Brand, Imagine youe Future.

Welcome Dorie, Jenny, I'm glad to be talking with you.

Thank you so much for taking the time. I loved that's your more recent book. I just have to say I think it is absolutely fantastic and I love how you say standing out is no longer an option.

Can you talk a little bit about.

Why it's no longer optional?

Sure, sure. Specifically, what I talk about in the.

Book is the fact that.

Being average, being good enough, being the Sort of local person who's shaking hands at the Chamber of Commerce and expecting that that's the way that you can get business. That's unfortunately an outmoded way of doing business because we are now in a global competitive community where it's not the case that you're the local graphic designer. So of course you're going to be tapped to design someone's brochures. They can get somebody on Elance for $5 or on Fiverr. So you have to give people a compelling reason to choose you. And standing out is the way to do that. You have to identify and share with the world the unique, special sauce that you have. You have to ensure that they understand what you are capable of and have them say, I want that. And yes, it's a premium. Yes, it's more than $5, but I'm willing to do that because what he offers or what she offers is so special. I know it's a good value.

I love how you say becoming an expert is not for the rare few of us, the holy grails out there. It's really a skill that any of us can learn. And I think it's really important how you break down your book into two parts. One, how to find your breakthrough idea and figure out what you want to be an expert in. And then second is building a following around it. So let's talk about the first part, which is how can people start to really become an expert and have a breakthrough idea? What are the ingredients to get there?

So in my research for Standout, I interviewed about 50 top thought leaders in a variety of fields, everything from business to genomics to urban planning, and tried to determine the common elements, the common denominator that linked them and that allowed them to really become recognized for their expertise. And what I found was that there are five principal strategies that people used. You certainly don't have to use all of them. Generally, these experts employed one or maybe two, but they were strategies that enabled them to really stand out from the crowd. So I can go into more depth about any of them. But the first one is developing niche strategy, really going deep and getting known for one particular thing, and then branching out strategically. The second is combining ideas, combining disciplines. So if you can take two really disparate fields, whether it's math and biology or auto manufacturing and startups, if you can combine those, you can get really interesting breakthrough ideas. The third is doing original research. And this could be anything from writing your own reviews to taking a sort of journalistic style and interviewing a bunch of people. It could be conducting a survey, whatever it is, but it's about creating new data rather than just opining about things that other people are saying. Number four is tackling a big target. It's literally about engaging with big enough ideas. Because for a lot of people, the, the tricky part is that we think too small. We focus on minor issues, minor problems, and so we only get incremental advances. But if you tackle a big challenge, then you're likely to have a big breakthrough. Then fifth, and finally, there's the strategy of what I call creating a framework, which basically means that we would assume that for most fields, that the foundational principles have already been established a long time ago, but that's actually really not true. A lot of things that we talk about regularly really haven't been parsed or explained in the way that you think they might. So, for instance, people obviously, unfortunately, have been going through grief or loss from the beginning of time. But it was only when Elizabeth Kubler Ross said, really, there are five stages of grief that people go through that everyone said, oh, you're right, that makes sense. And it puts a framework around it so that anytime that issue comes up, people refer to you and your ideas because you created an explanatory device so powerful.

What I love about your breakdown of the five categories is you're really saying anyone can become a thought leader. Pick one that resonates with you. Pick an approach or two. But you don't need to kind of make this up out of nowhere. And if someone's really good with systems and structure, maybe it's the methodology approach.

Yes, yes, exactly. It's finding the place that. That feels the most natural and comfortable for you. So, for instance, one thing you're doing right now in writing your book is you are interviewing a variety of people and gathering that information. So just in that process, you are demonstrating.

Creating your own expertise and developing your breakthrough idea with a pivot method, but creating original research and an original body of work. And that's something that anyone can do, whether it's one or two interviews for a blog post or dozens of them for a book. So it's really accessible. You don't have to be a special person or a genius to come up with a meaningful idea. You just need to figure out how you want to apply yourself and do the work.

I think a lot of times people think about a thought leader as authors or someone that they see prominently out there in social media. And I recently interviewed a mutual friend of ours, David Zweig, author of the Invisible, thanks to your introduction. And he interviews people who are not seeking the spotlight or not necessarily comfortable with it.

I'm curious to hear your perspective.

Can anyone become a thought leader? Should most people strive to become a thought leader in some way? And what's important about doing that and in an authentic way?

I think absolutely anyone has the capacity to become a thought leader. You need to have certain baselines. One thing that I talk about and stand out is the fact that I actually really like the phrase thought leader. It gets overused, of course, sometimes. But the reason that I like the phrase is that it implies two very important things. One is that it has thought in it, which means that you are recognized for your ideas, for your intellectual contribution. You're not famous because you're a celebrity. You're not famous for being famous. You're famous for your ideas, and that really matters. The second part is leader, and that's critical because there's a lot of people with good ideas in the world, but if they're stuck in the ivory tower and no one has ever heard of their ideas, if they're not sharing them, if they're not engaging with the public, then it's a really limited impact. If you want your ideas to actually do something in the world, then you need to be a leader and you need to cultivate followers. That's a necessary part of it. So I think if people are willing to do those two things, if they're willing to invest in creating ideas that matter, and if they're willing to invest in letting people know about those ideas, then, yes, they can definitely be a thought leader. And it doesn't mean that. That you have to be the world's expert, the one person who is the expert on networking or on biological sciences or whatever it is. There can be thought leaders within a company. I profile a guy in my book in Standout named Michael Leckie from Gartner, the research firm. He told me about his experiences when he originally starting out. He didn't know that much about coaching and training, but he was interested in it. And so he applied himself and started learning about it and taking trainings and gaining expertise and sharing it with other people. And as a result, he became a local expert. He became recognized within the context of Gartner as someone who is a localized thought leader, so that when people had questions about that inside the firm, they came to him. And that's something that is very attainable for anyone and I think is actually a really good idea. It is a form of career insurance, because people know, oh, geez. If I have a question about this, I should ask her. And that begins to make you indispensable within the confines of your company.

I love that it's such a great example of what you describe as, you can be a big fish in a small pond. You don't have to be the world's number one expert. That to be the best even in your company is a great place to start and extremely valuable. You have so many gems in this book, so many quotables, but I just want to read one. On the subject of thought leadership, you say it's not about selling books or going on the lecture circuit or schmoozing at elite conferences. It's about solving real problems and making a difference in a way that creates value for yourself and others.

True thought leadership is a gift.

It's a willingness to be brave, open up, and share yourself. It's a willingness to risk having your ideas shot down because you genuinely believe they can help others. So different than the reality TV star who's a celebrity for being a celebrity.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's important to put that out there and to make it known because sometimes, I mean, I ended up excising this in the editing process, but people like David Brooks, who's a columnist for the New York Times, he wrote this screed a year or two ago, really making fun of thought leaders. And there's some people who kind of get puffed up in the media and they seem to be. The life of a thought leader seems to be traveling from one Clinton Global Initiative conference to another. And that seems to be what thought leadership is about, at least in the public perception sometimes. I liked it so much. I thought it was so juicy. I wanted to quote it and then rebut it, but ultimately I pulled it out. But I thought it was important to fight back against that idea. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a thought leader. That is not a form of self aggrandizement. It is a form of wanting to make a difference. And I actually think that.

If people don't want to make a difference with their ideas, there's something wrong there. Work is the locus of meaning in our contemporary society. I mean, this is how we spend at least eight hours a day for 30 plus years. And I find it sad if there are people that say, oh, I don't really care if my work is meaningful or if my ideas are meaningful. I want everyone to aspire to that. I think that's a good way to be. And a Good way to lend meaning to our life is to be able to say, what idea am I passionate about? What can I contribute to the world and what is the vehicle that I have at my disposal to be able to do that?

Hear, hear. I could not agree with you more. I just wrote a blog post. Looking for your life purpose or frustrated trying to figure out your life purpose? Try this one and just be helpful. Make an impact. I agree with you 100% that it's okay if you don't know yet exactly your specific niche for being a thought leader. But what you're describing, Dori, is that the essence of it is making an impact and helping others start there. And you even say in Standout, you don't, don't cast the net so wide to start, you actually have to kind of test in a small pool first and then grow more organically. And you say when you put in the work, clients and opportunities will come to you. Wouldn't that be nice? So can you talk actually a little bit about once someone does have their breakthrough idea, how do they build a following and what's the difference between audience, community and say, network and peers?

Yeah. So what I describe in standout, what I've ascertained from interviewing these top thinkers, is that really there's a three step process to getting your ideas known in the world and in the marketplace. And I'll explain these. But broadly speaking, it is one to one. Idea transmission is how you start. Then you go one to many and then finally you reach many to many. The basic idea of this is that first of all, you want to start with a small group of trusted advisors. We can think of it as a mastermind group. We can think of it as a personal board of directors or a kitchen cabinet, however you want to frame it. But it's really important for people to have this small group of folks who have their best interests at heart, who are smart and thoughtful and can help you early on refine your ideas and get the support you need to help bring them to the next level. Because a mistake that a lot of people make is that sometimes they throw their ideas out into the world too fast, they're not refined, the idea doesn't work, and they say, oh well, that's a failure. And they move on. When the truth is if you tweaked it maybe 10%, it might actually work. You need to have those people to vet it first. So that's one to one. The second part is one to many, which is often what people immediately go to and think about. When they think of spreading ideas. So this is how do you get your ideas out and talked about by a variety of people. This could be giving speeches, this could be writing blog posts, this could be getting active on Twitter or things like that. But it's giving people ways that they can find you and find your ideas. How do you sort of put the beacon out into the world so that people who are like minded can come to you? And the third and final place where ideas spread is many to many idea transmission. And this is where ideas really take life. Because no matter how good your idea is, if you remain the only person talking about it, it is not going to thrive because there's only so much talking you can do. You need other people to talk about it. You need people to become an ambassador for this idea. The way you get there is that you've created, ideally an idea that is powerful enough and resonant enough that other people hear it and take it on as their own. The distinction is the idea from the beginning can't be a self interested idea. So if the sum total of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean in message was, hey, buy my book, it's called Lean in, then it's not going to go very far. Only Sheryl Sandberg and her publisher really care about that. But if the message is, hey, let's empower women, let's have women stand up and get their full potential realized, let's ask for that raise or that promotion, let's volunteer to chair that committee, that's something that individual women can see themselves in, that resonates with them and they become the messengers. They say, let's form a lean in group at work. Let's read this in our book group and the message spreads worldwide.

I love your framework and the way that you break it down. And Sheryl Sandberg is a great example of many to many. Because if you go to the Lean in website, there are kits basically like an E kit to create your own Lean in circle. So there's an example where Cheryl's not involved at all, but she has completely empowered the community to grow many to many.

That's exactly right. And certainly it helps Sheryl Sandberg in her brand. I mean, you can't talk about leaning in without thinking about her or mentioning her. But it's not all about her. And that's really the key, is that the best ideas are not self focused. They're focused on ideas that help others.

So the pivot method is about how someone can navigate when they hit a pivot point in their career, how to figure out what's next and build the.

Bridge to get there.

And I know that's something you've talked a lot about even in Reinventing you. And we both talk about how the best case scenario when you're pivoting to have the most options is to be.

Discoverable, to put yourself out there and be able to be found.

What are some of the ways that you've seen people.

Kind of basically navigate career changes most seamlessly and successfully? The people who it almost seems magic where the second they want to make a change, opportunities are coming to them. What makes those people stand out?

Well, you've really put your finger on it when it comes to discoverability. I think that a lot of people hope that they will be chosen, hope that they will be picked by other people. This is sort of the latter day version of being the new kids on the block and being discovered at the mall by Maurice Starr.

It would be nice were tapped and suddenly got to be in a, you know, a million selling boy band. But you know, that's not a realistic hope for most people. And similarly it's not realistic to imagine that, you know, the perfect person with a perfect dream job is, you know, is going to come to you and say yes you, unless you have given them the way to find you. And so I'll give you one example. There's a young woman that I profile in standout named Miranda Aisling Hines and she.

She wrote a book as her, a self published book as her master's thesis. She wanted, she was in an arts education master's program and she didn't want to just write a traditional thesis that would go on a shelf and nobody would read it. She was very committed as an educator to wanting to create something that would be helpful to regular people in the real world. And so for her master's thesis she got permission to create her own book and self publish it. And she called it Don't Make Art, Just Make Something. And her goal, she had a very clear message was she wanted to demystify art. Because she says, and I think she's right, that for a lot of adults if you ask them, well, are you an artist? Most people would say no, unless they're a small tiny percentage of people who are professional artists. But she says everyone's creative. And so art as a term gets people hung up. They say, oh, I'm not an artist, I can't do that. But she wants people to feel free to tap into their creativity. So thus don't make art just make something. So she self publishes this book and she's not making money off of it. It's not a best seller. She has copies that she sells at street fairs and she gives some to her friends. And so she gave a copy to her friend who worked at an arts organization. He, when he finished, gave it to his boss to read. And it turns out a few months later there was a job opening at this arts organization and Miranda really wanted it. So she applied for the job. And because the executive director had read her book and already knew who she was, she got the job easily. She went in and she had two interviews. And at both of the interviews all he wanted to talk about was her book. She didn't have to sell herself, her book had already done it for her. And that's the kind of power that we're talking about, is finding a way to share your ideas so that you attract people to you.

That is such an awesome example. And first of all, her call to action could be for all of us. And even the topic of this call, if you're worried about how to stand out, don't make art, make something, just do something. And don't try and have it be.

Perfect right out the gate.

But second of all, it does not have to be a best seller. There are so many issues, ancillary benefits to producing thought leadership. And I have another friend who wrote a book, it didn't sell very well at first. She was a little disappointed, but proud of doing this. What do you know, A year later she's ready to change jobs and she gets coached by a global organization. A dream beyond dream job for her. She's a senior level leader now and they read her book during the interview process and I have no doubt that it helped them realize she was the candidate for them. So even if that book only sold the five copies and one of them looks to this global super prestigious luxury brand, hell yes, it worked. You're not in charge of what the results are. All you can do is put your best foot forward. And then I really do think that serendipity and there is some amount of trust, but your people will find you or at least have a heck of a better chance. And if you keep it all locked up inside, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, in my own life, this is really how I try to do my business. I literally had a phone call at 8 o' clock this morning today with a guy who's the chief human resources officer for a very, very large national association based in D.C. and he had emailed me over the weekend because they're setting up a new discussion series at their headquarters. And he wanted me to be a speaker because he said he was familiar with my work, he was a fan of my work, and so he wanted to invite me. I had never met this guy. I'd never heard of him. But he reached out to me because he was familiar with my work. I didn't have to sell myself. He was offering because he already knew that he wanted me. And that's a great feeling and a great position to be in.

All right, well, as we start to wrap up, any parting words of standout wisdom that we haven't covered on this call, particularly for people who are in the midst of a career pivot?

Well, I think that one of the most important things when it comes to. To standing out is realizing that this isn't an instant process, and it doesn't have to be an instant process at the beginning. And you were alluding to this, Jenny. You don't have to come in fully formed with this immediate idea of, oh, I know what my big breakthrough idea is. Most of us don't. In fact, there's a researcher named David Galenson. He's been written about, perhaps most famously by Malcolm Gladwell, in his various essays and in his book what the Dog Saw. And David is a professor at the University of Chicago. He's an economist who actually studies art and creativity. And in his work, he discovered that there's really two models, two primary models for how painters and a lot of other artists operate. And the first one, which is celebrated to perhaps even too great of an extent, is the sort of young genius, somebody like Picasso, who, from an early young age knows exactly what they want to do, and they have a creative vision, and they go and they do it. But it turns out that probably most artists are not like Picasso. For most artists, they actually emerge later in life as part of an iterative process because they have to try a lot of things in order to really learn what their unique contribution is. And that is totally normal. I think it's really like that for people in business. I know for me, certainly, the topic of my first book, Reinventing youg, is about the fact that I had to try a lot of different careers in my 20s. I mean, some of them, you know, I turned out that I needed to learn what was interesting about them to me and what wasn't. In some cases, it was just that I was foiled, like being laid off as a journalist or working on political campaigns that lost. But it took me a while to Find the place where I wanted to make my professional mark as a writer and thinker in the marketing space. So I think we shouldn't get discouraged if we don't know right away what our ideas are. And we shouldn't get discouraged if it takes a while for the ideas to spread again. It is absolutely the exception that these things happen overnight. It's very rare. It took me between two and three years of blogging all the time. I mean, literally 100 plus blogs a year, between two and three times a week. Took me two or three years to actually start getting inbound inquiries about speeches and things like that. Up to that point, I was doing a lot of content. It was certainly helpful in terms of building my credibility with people that I was meeting in other contexts, but it wasn't necessarily coming to me. But it is the accretion over time. It is the fact that because you are persistent and other people are not, that is what will enable you to be triumphant in the end with your ideas. And so that is something that I hope that people will keep in mind.

I love that and I am so, so glad you shared that. It's so important. I call it a thousand tiny iterations over time. I've had my first website for 10 years. If people looked at what I was doing now and tried to build that overn, there's no way. I mean, it's just, it's been a thousand tiny iterations over time. And I think, Dori, you and I can both agree that even though we have books that are coming out, we're going to change, you know, our chosen area of thought leadership. Maybe we'll have similar themes, but we're not done. You don't just check a box and say, okay, check thought leadership box done. You know, But I think for anyone doing this work, it's always going to be evolving. You're almost going to be evolving and changing it more than it feels fixed.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, you know, your first book is Life After College and you know, let's run it. You can only bang that drum for so long.

Right?

So you are pivoting. You are living it.

Yeah. And that's honestly, that's what inspired the book, the Pivot Method. Because my change process was so overwhelming and confusing, I felt stuck for years. I was the girl who left Google, but I didn't know what else. It took me years and I thought this is incredibly inefficient. So me being a systems person, I figure there has got to be a way to make this process more methodical. To your point, the fifth standout category of putting a framework around something that I think people will only be experiencing more and more, which is that big career kind of reckoning moment of who am I and what do I want? I think we're going to be going through that a lot more than we used to in the past.

Yes, exactly.

Dori, thank you so much for writing these incredible books and sharing all of your insights on this call. I appreciate it so much and I know everyone listening does too. Where can people find you and your book if they want to keep in touch?

Thanks, Jenny. So my website, where I actually have more than 400 free articles is doryclark.com and folks can also sign up for my email newsletter there and receive some fun bonuses like the Reinventing youg Self Assessment and also a special workbook that I created for standout called 139Questions to help you find your breakthrough idea and build a following around it. So if that doesn't get your juices flowing, I don't know what will. I'm on Twitter @doryclark. Awesome.

Dori, you are one of my favorite thought leaders and connectors and relationship builders. Thank you for everything that you do. And thank you everyone for listening.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit jennyblake Me, where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and business. Or find me on Twitter @jennyblake. And remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.