By Rhea
I was recently watching the Netflix film “Don’t Look Up,” with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, about two astronomers on a media tour warning of a comet that
will wipe out humankind. The film makes fun of our distracted society, disengaged politicians and disinterest in what science has to tell us, even if it means we only have a couple more months to live.
Unfortunately, the society portrayed in the film is very much the one we are living in today. It’s one in which scientists and experts find it hard to have their important ideas heard because so many other people with more salient messages are hogging the microphone.
This is our reality, and while changing it is difficult, it’s still possible to successfully grab an audience’s attention.
It starts with experts understanding and accepting their responsibility to write and communicate smarter.
That’s right: Smart people have a responsibility to write smarter. How else will we counter all the noise? How else will important ideas be heard?
It is our responsibility as experts on a journey to thought leadership to contribute uniquely and authentically to the bigger conversation and do it in a way that makes it easy for general audiences to digest our thinking.
I believe that this world has most of the solutions we already need to our biggest problems, but many of them are stuck in experts’ heads. If you are an expert, we need to hear your ideas. You personally need to bring them across in a way that is convincing, not rely on communications intermediaries like the marketing department or ghostwriters.
When you as an expert are enabled with story smarts, you start making your ideas real and tangible on a daily basis, thereby boosting the business, bringing research forward and infusing creativity into work.
Hearing your authentic voice out there in the world is just the antidote we need to the canned content and misinformation that gives us information whiplash every day.
It’s not only good for you and your career prospects, it’s also good for society at large.