Gurus are everywhere, from self-development expert to marketing gods, to beauty and fitness top personalities.
If I focus on looking into Linked In, things are even worse (or better, it depends on how you see things): we got plenty of 30 under 30 | top influencers | head of everything | CEO.
I am astonished by the sheer amount of business geniuses we have in the world, and being close to 8 billion, this is ok with statistics.
Then I asked myself: what happens if I start following the ones I think give real insightful views of the world? Or the active profiles with interesting posts?
The way to know was trying it out, so I did. I started flagging with “following” each thing crossed my path and resonated (off topic, if you want to usefully resonate in your communications, check out the book by Nancy Duarte).
After a few weeks of (unscientifically validated) experience, I may see that I receive:
- Tens of meaningful advice on career
- Zillions of reposting of sentences from famous authors (including wrong quotations, fake news, wrong attributions)
- An incredible amount of the same content, reposted recrafted by different people in my same network
The result for my poor limited brain is flat impact.
I mean by this that if only one person posts something interesting out of one thousand, I will spot her, and this will give a result.
If instead everyone is there, telling the same things, it won’t work. At least, not for me.
I am not referring to sellers, the people who sell marketing courses, coaching or other services: those are ok to do their marketing as they want. It is a market; fair play is being competitive.
But the wannabe experts are too many, so no one stands out.
Even more, using AI anyone can create in a second a well written post, accurately boring, specifically equal to any other. A perfect mass production of unrequired advice to prove that you are as good as…anyone else.
Well, after this, I decided to unguru myself: I stop following who does not stand out, who provides useful common sense, and I keep who provides nonsense or peculiar comments.
Even if “unordinary writer” may not provide advice to become the next CEO of Google, they make me think. They push me to consider their topics, their ideas, their critiques. And I feel better by reading them out of the box thinking.
By the way: we have got at least a million people qualified for the job on linked in, but the role is for one person. This makes me think that who got it was just statistically lucky. Or, more likely, the real skills to hold Google CEO post is not captured by the 10 top rules posted by any good unsolicited adviser.
So, unguru yourself for me means declutter, follow the misaligned ones, and of course do not forget that the many others provide useful suggestion, but just following one will do the trick.
The next question is: how to stand the crowd out in a crowded place where everyone tries the same trick to get on stage? Shall we really go on stage or just change theatre?
Well, I unguru myself: I leave the theatre, and I walk into the market.