YOUR THINKING IS THE PRODUCT
You’re weird and unique and irreplaceable. Own it.
Photo: JJJJound
If you’re a creative or business leader, the most important information about you is not on your resume or your LinkedIn profile.
It’s not your portfolio, your work ethic, your taste or your experience.
It’s your value system.
The most desirable professional roles are about thinking. Being surprised by new information and making unrehearsed decisions in unpredictable circumstances with a varying group of people. You can’t effectively do this without a value system to filter through.
The more exclusive the job, less a strict playbook will help you, and the bigger the role your values play. And yet, most of you have not defined your own value system in a paragraph.
You’ve performed global rebrands and organizational transformations and 3x revenue increases and your only online presence is a LinkedIn profile packed with jargon?
Let’s fix that.
You need a landing page. One page on the internet. Your name dot info. A professional photo. Employer and client names/logos a small cluster. A paragraph about you, written by someone who knows how to write. A few links to potentially polarizing articles written by YOU.
You will be tempted to overthink this and I’m going to urge you not to.
Nothing overly dramatic or polished. A simple landing page. Here, my friend Chris will give you an example.
Forget about SEO. Your best opportunities will still come through personal referrals — your landing page just validates those referrals. That’s important, because having a distinct value system is what gives you a positioning, weeds out bad clients and employers, and eliminates the need for pitching your services.
My friend Atlas gives this advice:
Write down the one judgment your buyers can’t get anywhere else.
Forget your features. Forget your process for a second. I want you to think about the actual view you hold about their problem that a competitor wouldn’t say, or wouldn’t say out loud.
Sit down and finish this sentence honestly:
“Most people in my space tell buyers X, but what’s actually true is Y.”
Atlas’ advice is aimed at small businesses, but guess what: As a leader for hire, you are a small business. So adopt this advice and apply it to your situation.
Sharpen your point of view by writing and publishing. Link to those essays on your landing page. You don’t need a “following”; you need thought-provoking ideas that can be shared with other thinkers, thus moving you into new rooms and flattening out hierarchies.
Jack Dyson summarizes it perfectly:
“A portfolio tells them what you’ve done. A point of view tells them how you think. The thinking is the product.”
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