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A few days into my first post-college, big boy job with
the Federal government, my boss offered me one of the most profound bits of
professional advice I have ever received.
"If you want to succeed here, or in any other job," he said,
"then you have to become an expert."
I asked the obvious question: "An expert in what, sir?"
"It doesn’t matter. Just make yourself an expert in something, and when
you’ve done that, you’ll be indispensable."
Not much for a literal-minded office neophyte to work with, but I took his
words at face value and looked for a field in which I could become an expert.
As it turned out, this was right around the time that the Federal government
decided that fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement were bad things, and that
agencies might want to consider implementing systems to ensure their
organizations were free from such burdens on the taxpayers’ wallets.
Rules and regulations for what was dubbed "internal controls" fell
from on high (most of them jargon-heavy codifications of such common sense
rules as "Don’t let the fox guard the henhouse" and "A penny
saved is a penny earned"), and it dropped to the office I worked in to figure
out how we might satisfy the District of Columbiacrats,
but without fundamentally changing our agency’s own culture (which was
already prudent to a fault) or wrapping our engineers in cocoons of sticky
red tape and paperwork. In short, we needed an internal controls expert--and
I saw (and took) the perfect opportunity to run with the wisdom my boss had
imparted to me.
Over the years, I have parlayed my early success as that program’s internal
controls expert into a variety of interesting positions and opportunities. Of
course, I’ve had to become an expert in many other things--budgeting,
security, procurement, fundraising, public relations, art and music among
them--in order to keep myself fresh and marketable in changing work
situations. But the fundamental lesson remains valid: as long as you’re the
go-to guy for some necessary discipline in your professional field, you’ll
always be in demand.
So how do you become an expert? First off, you’ve got to carefully pick your
field of expertise. There are two optimal ways of doing this: either by
picking a field that no one knows they need until you convince them
otherwise, or by picking a field that everyone knows they need, but in which
no one else wants to become the expert.
Once you’ve identified your field, research is the crucial next step--and you
should seek the most primary, core documents available, so that you can
assimilate and spin them in your way and on your own terms, rather than
relying on secondary spin by others. You’ve got to have a working
comprehension of the field that will allow you to go several questions deep
when challenged, and (perhaps most importantly) you have to possess complete
mastery of the field’s lingo and jargon, so you’re not undone by an
infelicitous slip in terminology at a key juncture.
Note well, though, that when faced in public with the unanswerable question
or the indecipherable phrase, the true expert relies less on
bluff-on-the-spot than on convincing others that he or she knows exactly
where to get the right answer. It’s always better to say "I’ll find out,
sir" (and then find out, fast) than it is to get caught in a tortured
obfuscation of some point about which you’re uncertain.
You look far more confident and in control that way,
and confidence is key to becoming an expert. If you don’t believe in your
expertise, then no one else will either--and if no one else believes in your
expertise, then you’ve failed in making yourself indispensable. You’ve got to
market your expertise, too, since if no one knows about it, then you’re not
doing yourself (or your employer) any good in having it. If you say something
long and loud enough, it’s more than likely to become true (or to be
perceived as truth, which is essentially the same thing).
This is why every waiter in New York will tell you he’s an actor. This is why freelance writers call
themselves freelance writers, even when no one is (yet) printing their work.
You’ve got to hang your shingle as soon as you can, probably before you’re
really ready to do so, since you will gain more expertise by actual
real-world work and interaction than you will by overstaying your time in an
academic research mode. You’ll learn from your mistakes this way,
too--oftentimes more than you’ll from your successes.
But you will have successes and you will learn from them, as will others:
once you’ve deployed your expertise with aplomb a few times, those who
benefit from it will continue to seek you out, and will generally spread the
word about your expertise to others, since everyone likes to get credit for
being the first to spot something or someone useful. Success and expertise
snowball from this point, one feeding the other--until the day when you
realize that, holy crow, you really are an expert in your chosen field, and
you really have made yourself indispensable.
And what do you do then? You look for a new field of expertise, since nobody
wants to read yesterday’s news, everybody wants to know what you’ve done for
them lately, and the only things constant in life are change--and the demand
for experts to shepherd others through it.
Copyright 2003: J. Eric Smith.
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