Peter Winick distinguishes between self-help books and books written to solve the author's own problem that happen to help others. Many thought leaders build content around personal pain points they overcame. The real opportunity: find where your struggle overlaps with what your clients need and whether a market exists for it.
Hi there, it's Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and here's the idea I'd like to share with you today, and that is this: is it a self-help book, or is it a book that you wrote to help yourself? What do I mean by this? Why a lot of thought leaders do what they do— when you start to talk to them and when you start to ask them questions, oftentimes one of the most common themes that comes up is it was an issue they were struggling with. It was a problem they were trying to solve. It was something that they think was causing too much pain or there needed to be an easier way. So they went about and they solved the problem. Now, they might have done it for selfish reasons. They might have done it out of curiosity. But the book, using that as sort of the proxy for the thought leadership, became a book to help others, not a self-help book. even though it helped them figure out whatever it was they needed to figure out. So my question for you is, what are the things that you might need a little bit of help with that align with the needs of your clients, with the needs of your prospects, that you're just curious about? And if it's something that is of concern to you, is there a large enough market of others that would be, uh, having— facing the same challenges that there could be a business opportunity there? So again, sometimes it's self-help, sometimes it's to help yourself, sometimes those two are really connected. Love to hear what you think.
