How to Cultivate a Unique Point of View
If you’re thinking, “I don’t have a unique point of view. I just want to get more clients and do a good job,” don’t worry.
Most people in the world, especially in the business world, are not very unique. If you care about your profession (you should), then it isn’t that difficult to cultivate an increasingly original perspective on your field.
The best part is that the most useful thing you can do is… write.
As we’ll discuss more in-depth in other chapters, writing— especially blogs, articles, and books— is an important Thought Leadership marketing activity. It turns out that it is also an incredibly powerful way to cultivate your unique point of view.
When you write, you have to organize your thoughts. You have to work through what you know, what you believe, and what you think. You have to take your vague ideas and mold them into concrete, shareable concepts. Writing forces you to think clearly.
Writing a single article about an incredibly specific topic will help you gain a unique perspective on that topic. As you write many articles over time, a unique perspective on your entire field will start to develop.
You don’t need to be able, today, to sum up your unique point of view in a few words. This isn’t about having an original opinion on some aspect of your industry (although that’s great if you do).
This is about developing, over time, an original voice.
In all the noise of new media marketing madness— amid all the spam and sales pitches and really pointless crap— what people really want is something:
- new
- fresh
- genuine
- thoughtful
- meaningful
If you write down your ideas (or record them), and if you do so because you care about your clients, you will start to find your own voice emerging.
You’ll have to chisel away at the fillers, the cliches, and the garbage to get to it (that’s called good editing). You’ll have to sand down the rough edges of bad spelling and grammar (good proofreading). But you’ll find your unique perspective under there somewhere. You just have to do the work.
