Last weekend, I popped down to Portland, Oregon with some friends.

In addition to some gorgeous scenic areas and a ridiculously elevated food scene, Portland is home to the world’s largest independent book store: Powell’s City of Books.

It’s four stories, occupies a full city block, and when you walk in, it’s...anything but fancy.

Quite utilitarian actually, which it has to be to house hundreds of thousands of titles across seemingly any sub-genre you could imagine.

I was really in awe of the shared spirit of curiosity of everyone in the building, which essentially serves as a massive, analog expertise exchange.

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It struck me that when you see that much knowledge, physically codified under one roof, it’s easy to just blend it all into ‘that’s a lot of books.’

But for each book to make it to that store (or any store, for that matter), the author had to do two things:

1. Draw some lines around a subset of their unique expertise
2. Actively distill it from the abstract into shareable form

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Without those two actions, that City of Books would sit empty.

And the would-be authors would be just interesting people with brilliant, amorphous ideas swilling around their head as they otherwise move through the world.

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The expertise economy requires those same actions of us soloists.

It’s all well and good to move through our careers, accumulating insights and points-of-view along the way.

But we’re not in the business of being experts.

We’re in the business of sharing our expertise.

And to do that, you’ve got to decide:

1. What is my specialty and my unique perspective on it
2. How do I distill that into something shareable

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A book is great.

A framework or methodology is even easier.

A crisp visual is even more shareable and can land even harder.

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But regardless of format, skipping distillation altogether will leave you, with all your earned insights and big ideas, in the unenviable pile of “yeah, I’m sure they’re smart”

And well short of “Ahh. I can see how they think. I need to talk to them.”

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Stay stuck in your head.

Or get out on the shelf.

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💡

-Wes

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P.S. If you’ve been struggling in intro calls to articulate your deep expertise, book a free consult to see if an “Intellectual Headshots” sprint could be the right fit.

Two weeks. One-on-one. We distill your expertise into five ‘Headshots’ — durable, visual assets that speak for you and pave the way for rich client conversations.