TJ Walker explains how long it takes to become an expert: weeks for new tech, decades for established fields. His advice: pick a narrow niche, read everything in it, then create content daily while practicing. He's spent decades building expertise in media and presentation training.
Chapters
Shane writes in with a few questions about being an expert and an expert speaker. So, cj, I know something I'm good at, but I'm not the best one in my field. How can I cultivate myself to be an expert? Also? How long does it take to be an expert? Well, there are a lot of different answers to that. There are certain brand new technologies, social media applications where if you dive in and read every book on the subject and immerse yourself, you might be a world class expert in a month. There are other industries and other fields where if you don't spend 30 years in it, you're not an expert. I have spent more than 30 years as a full time media and presentation training expert or at least working in those fields and I'm still learning, but I certainly held myself out as an expert earlier than last week. So it depends on your niche, it depends on how much the body of knowledge is. Here's one thing I would suggest, dive deep into some niche so that you can make a legitimate claim to being the best in the world at something. Now, you may define that as the best within your city or the best within your state, or the best for a particular age group, but you can always define yourself narrowly and then focus and become the best at it. One of the things that's interesting in our modern times with Amazon, Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Unlimited is you literally in one weekend could go through a hundred books on a particular subject. If you're a fast reader and you're skimming and some of the short books on a particular subject and really now more than 98% of the population, in fact more than almost everyone with Kindle, and I'm a member of Kindle Unlimited, I'm not doing any sort of Amazon affiliate thing, don't worry about that. But with that, you get unlimited number of books for I think it's $9 a month and you keep 10 out at a time, but you just read 10 and replace it. Each one you replace it with, you bump the one out you had. So you can really go deep into a niche very, very quickly in a way that frankly I couldn't. When I started getting really serious about my public speaking media training business 20 years ago, I went to a library and I had to check out books and trudge bags of books home and read, read them in a slow, laborious way and bring all the books back. You don't have to do that anymore. The number one way you're going to develop expertise is by speaking and writing on that subject. Every day. Now, the only way to do that is you've got to be reading, thinking about it, and doing it every day, too. But, for example, I would give myself a goal. A deadline of at least one blog post per day on your subject matter and at least one video per day where you're giving commentary, analysis, reporting on the subject. Do that every day, my friend, and you will be an expert sooner rather than later.
