How Do You Become an Expert?
Repeat, then repeat, and repeat again. If one could be a professional golfer and win the World Cup after only one lesson everyone would be a world class golfer. But we all know that one lesson doesn’t give us the ability to be the expert.
Incredible athletes and successful business owners have a few things in common. They practice a craft or skill until they are the expert. They understand that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until they can do it well. They also understand that they will not become the expert at everything overnight.
If you are a business owner you have several things to master. Focus on one area that you need to become the expert at, then focus only on that until you’ve mastered it by repeating and repeating the action:
- If you need to improve your sales skill, you may want start by learning your product or service from top to bottom—the features, the benefits, the value, and how it meets a need for your customers.
- Interview your customers. Get feedback. Study the feedback. Once you are truly an expert on your product or service, then, and only then, should you move on to the next step in selling your product such your target market.
While these are basic examples, so are the disconnects between learning and doing. We must break down our learning into simple steps, repeat the step until we are the expert at it and then move on to the next step.