What is wisdom?
The dictionary (at least the one on my desk) says ‘Good sense, judgment; accumulated learning, knowledge.’ You don’t have to have grey hair and a long white beard (or whatever the female equivalent is) to have wisdom. It’s something that we grow over the years of experience.
The challenge is that we’re not all wise about everything. You can’t know everything about everything or your brain would explode! We gain wisdom in things we are experts, specialist in or passionate about, without making much effort. We learn because we’re interested and excited about a subject or specialism.
Know what you’re good at
One of the first management books I read as a new business owner was Michael E. Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. It was full of ‘Aha’ moments, not least when, as a start-up solo business I had to be chief cook and bottle-washer. I knew my stuff that I was delivering to customers, but I was not so good at numbers (so the first thing I did was get an accountant). I wasn’t great at sales, but I had to do that to get the business off the ground. I knew a lot about training and HR – but didn’t need those skills in-house, as I didn’t have staff. I knew quite a lot about marketing which was useful and was fairly organised, so managed to keep the admin under control. I realised my wisdom was only in specific areas.
There is a down-side to having wisdom and passion for your pet subject – you usually enjoy doing things related to that and that means that, faced with the choice between doing something you enjoy and something that is a chore, you go for the easy win. That can mean essential tasks to running your business don’t get done.
Share your knowledge
The good news is that there are plenty of people who love doing the thing you don’t like, so you can usually outsource those to someone. There are accountants, marketers, telesales services, virtual assistants, graphic designers, web developers and many, many more services there to help you.
And better still, they are mostly in the same boat as you – loving what they do to earn a living, but not so excited about other aspects of running their business. They may be potential clients, as well as suppliers of a service.
Extrapolate that – people who don’t enjoy doing what you’re good at exist in the town 30 miles away, in the next county, nationwide – and, in some instances, globally. You can’t help everyone – or even reach out to them all.
But your wisdom shared in book form can reach far more people than you can as an individual.
Take your wisdom and transform it into an interesting and useful book, to inspire, guide and inform people who need your kind of knowledge, experience and learning.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t think you write well enough – that’s what an editor is for. Just think of how many people you can help with a book encompassing your wisdom.
