Thought leaders are driven by three things: money, ego, and the desire to spread ideas. Money funds your focus, ego gets satisfied when audiences respond, and the evangelical drive treats idea-spreading like a math problem of reach. These motivators coexist differently for each person at different times.
So I have found from my experience that there's 3 primary things that drive thought leaders. And it's not an either/or, it's more of a pie chart. So money is one, right? And money is a good thing, right? For some people, it's all about the money. How do I take my fee from here to here to here to here? How do I make as much money as possible every time I get on a plane? Or it could even be that money is the thing that is necessary to enable you to leave some other things. To only do this and only this, right? So it's starting to come off. Do I do I want to sell my business, leave my gig, leave my job? This is really what I love to do, but I want to be able to make a living at it. So everybody's money thing is different, and it tends to be dynamic and change over time. Second piece is ego. Ego gets a bad rap. When ego's bad, that's narcissism. That's not what I'm talking about. But there's something really cool for your ego making a living with your ideas, traveling the world talking about. stuff that you created and watching the light bulbs go off and watching people actually have a great interaction or process or do something with it. And then there's sort of the evangelical, not in the religious perspective, but you know that your way is better. And the more that you can unleash that and leverage it and scale it and get it out to more people, the better it's going to be. And even if you were speaking, you know, 100 times a year, it's still a math problem, right? 100 people in a room, 300 people in a room, your scale is limited. So I think that's the first piece, people getting some understanding around what's important to them when.
