My friend, Ryan Soave, is a therapist. He does a lot of work on addiction recovery. His belief is that recovery is a direction, not a destination. That it’s not a place a person arrives at. It’s a way of moving through life, recognising when they become misaligned, and returning to the practices that move them towards the direction in which they want to go.
I used to believe that authority was a destination.
I'm an anxious person, and when it comes to business, I work with an underlying terror that work will dry up. Even when things are going well, that just around the corner, all opportunities disappear, and I'm scrambling to survive. I think that fear is common among service providers.
That's the draw of authority. A promise of free-flowing inbound and an ongoing excess of demand that will solve all those anxieties forever.
That kind of supply and demand balance is real.
But it’s not a destination you arrive at, set for life.
Nancy Duarte runs a 100+ person authority business. She’s spoken on the highest profile stages, worked with the biggest brands, and her presentations have been viewed by millions of people on YouTube. When she releases a new book, there’s an immediate spike of interest, speaking opportunities, and inbound requests. But it’s a bell curve. She’s figured, the interest for every book typically drops after around three years, at which point she releases a new book and the cycle repeats. Even an authority with a groundbreaking book and TED talk cannot sit still.
Then there's the shift in niche entirely. When the iPhone was launched, Jonathan Stark, a web developer, predicted that it would change the way people use the internet. He turned his full attention to figuring out how to build mobile apps using web technologies, and quickly became an authority on the subject. His book was published by O'Reilly and he consulted for the likes of Staples, Time, and Cisco. But by 2016, the niche had eroded. Native tooling had improved, simpler frameworks had arrived, and the specific edge of his approach was gone. Stark moved out of mobile apps and into coaching independent consultants on pricing and packaging their expertise.
Then there’s the shift in what people are willing to buy. The market for digital courses was huge in 2020. Today, it’s collapsing. Chris Do of The Futur, who was making millions of dollars each year on these courses, is pivoting away from products and leaning into brand partnerships and speaking. It’s not that the market no longer values his expertise, rather it no longer values the way in which it was formerly packaged and sold.
All this is to say, the work of building authority is a practice, one that’s fluid and malleable. There’s not a single person who produced a breakthrough piece of insight and lived off it for the remainder of their career.
They evolve: publishing new material to stay relevant, shifting categories when markets move, or repackaging their expertise entirely.
The direction is real, but if you want the ongoing benefits, the practice of publishing and evolving never stops.