The beginner’s mind

Expertise becomes apparent when the expert adopts a beginner’s mind, publicly.

Here’s what that looks like:

You demonstrate a genuine curiosity about the painful frustration you solve. You have complete clarity on the boundaries of that frustration and who you’re solving it for. You’re exploring what you solve in real time, and sharing your findings along the way.

You develop legitimate opinions on topics you didn’t previously have a POV on.

As a result, your existing clients benefit directly from your insights, and people wrestling with the same challenges start to follow your work. They suffer from the same frustration, so when they encounter your material, they lean into this new voice.

The contrasting approach to the beginner’s mind is fear-based, and it’s far more common.

It’s the vendor’s mind.

You create content to prove expertise, not explore frustrations.

The thinking is intuitive: ‘I need to sell today, which means I need to look like an expert today, like I’ve already figured this out.’

Two things happen with this approach.

First, the content you produce doesn’t interest the people you’re trying to reach, so it attracts few readers and zero feedback. The material is driven by promotion, not insight, which means it has no value.

Then, you quit. Content can take 6-18 months before it regularly attracts readers who subsequently become clients. If you’re writing with ‘generate sales’ at the forefront of your mind, you’ll stop when nothing happens in months 2 and 3.

Your whole posture is out, and it comes across in the content.

The beginner’s mind works differently.

It's driven by curiosity.

Everything you create is informed by your own thinking, developed through writing, not regurgitated best practices designed for a generic market. Your content is specific to the frustration you solve, for the specific people you solve it for.

So how do you apply the beginner’s mind to your content?

1. Curate the questions clients ask. Notice the doubts that surface. Identify the thinking that holds them back. Capture all of it, immediately if possible, or as soon as you can. Then write to answer those questions.
2. Take David C. Baker’s 55 topic approach. List all the topics you need a point of view on, and cover one per month.

With either of these approaches, inbound represents the by-product, not the goal.

And one last advantage of the beginner’s mind, which shouldn’t be understated:

It keeps you in the game.

When you’re genuinely curious about a frustration, you write whether clients show up or not. And as Rory Sutherland says, life is fat-tailed. Every authority got lucky – the right person saw their work at the right time. By staying in the game, you create more opportunities for luck to find you.