Ramit Sethi and Ben Casnocha explain how young people build credibility without waiting to age. A 19-year-old author lost readers by targeting the wrong audience. The real move: solve actual problems, look professional, and use older advisors as credibility by association.
Some guy just asked a question on Twitter. Being 20 somethings, how do you go about getting people to value your expertise? Yeah, and this is a question I get a lot which is like, how do you gain credibility if you're young and starting a business or you're writing a book and you're young or trying to do other things that generally speaking are the domain of adults or older people? And I think my answer would be there are like 45 year olds who present themselves like they're 20 and there are 20 year olds who present themselves like they'RE 45. And if you present yourself professionally and have a professional attitude about things, then being a 20 something or 30 something, 40 something is kind of irrelevant. And there's been some chatter in the blogosphere about these Gen Y blogs and people who really talk about their generational identity a lot. And I think in general, how old you are shouldn't really matter. If you're a professional person with an interesting idea or a professional person starting a business that's solving a real problem, it doesn't matter. When I was starting my business, I was in my teens, but the problem that I was trying to solve was acute enough that it was able to attract the attention of customers who cared. So it seemed like the age was kind of irrelevant at some point.
And you just said the key point. I think if you are solving a problem, the age question goes away. If you are simply talking about how old you are and how interesting and cool you are, then nobody cares. I don't care. You have to ask yourself. In fact, I was talking to my.
Publisher and one of the things that.
They said that was pretty interesting to me was they said, yeah, Workman tends to be pretty good at not just identifying the readers, but the buyers. And I thought that was very interesting. The same is true of your stuff. When you started hunting, it wasn't just like, who's going to read my blog, it's who's going to buy who's going.
To buy the product. And so I think people and somebody once did a post or something about how one bad reason to start a business when you're young is you have a great excuse to fail. It's like, oh, I was 24 and no one took me seriously. That's why I failed. I think it's kind of overrated. Again, I think age can be irrelevant if you want it to be irrelevant if you present yourself professionally, if you write well and you're solving a real problem.
I heard about a story about a guy who wrote A book. He was like 19 and he had won a ton of money for college and he wrote this book on how to get money for college. The problem was, who's the audience for that? So he wrote it in a style that was like a 19 year old writing. So it's like written for like, you know, young people, which are of course never going to buy that book because.
They don't care about paying for college.
And then it wasn't comprehensive or written in the right way for older parents who are really the people who would buy it. So he's stuck in this middle ground, this area where in limbo, and no one's taking him seriously because his content does not deserve to be taken seriously. If you solve a specific problem right, that can really get people to value your credibility.
One other suggestion I have is you can sometimes gain credibility through osmosis. So when I was first, some of the early business meetings I was at, I would bring along gray haired advisors and perhaps overstate their involvement in what was going on. But nonetheless, by having them aside, next to me in the meeting, iconic, they kind of, they use credibility because they're older, established and professional. And through their endorsement of me, the others in the room kind of endorsed me. So that's another way, I think if you have an advisory board, you have older advisors who have credibility, try through osmosis to kind of glean something. We'll talk about mentoring as well.
