It started many years ago, with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He'd spent decades arguing for self-reliance, individual conscience, and a distinctly American way of thinking. Through essays like Self-Reliance, Emerson had become the kind of person whose ideas shaped how other people understood themselves, society and the world. He'd become an intellectual celebrity.
In 1876, a theologian named Charles Henry Appleton Dall wrote about Emerson and used a new description. Dall claimed that Emerson manifested:
“the wizard power of a thought-leader.”
This, by all accounts, is one of the earliest known uses of “thought leader” in print.
Here's the rub: becoming a thought leader like Emerson is unnecessary if your goal is to drive business. Though it certainly wouldn't hurt to become a celebrity, of sorts. You do not need to be a celebrity or a culture-shaping force. Instead, what your market needs is a voice who speaks to their problems, hopes, dreams and fears.
I had a mentor who once said, to lead a large market, you must first lead a small one. You must become the person who leads their thinking to the solution that you provide, and make that solution so compelling they would be foolish not to move forward.
Today, AI agents make this easier than ever. In fact, it has never been so easy to start speaking your truth-- and compelling your market to action, because AI agents can take out the 'grunt work' of posting and distributing your content. Social media algorithms push the content to the right people based on the words you say in your content.
Of course, for that to happen someone needs to be creating the content for the algorithm to push.
In Emerson's time, that could only happen through print. It took machines printing ink on paper, and horse and wagon to bring the content to the few highborns who were literate.
Today, you can get instantly get in front of your target market with the click of a button.
So why is it so hard for us to do, and furthermore, to get the results we want?
It comes down to value.
If an individual truly believed that the reward of posting were greater than the risk of doing so, posting would become natural.
Ironically, the reward for doing so-- for many people-- needs to mean something more than just business outcomes (though for some that is enough). What an individual needs to believe is that their content matters. That someone on the other side of the screen will be influenced and moved by what you are saying.
(This is why we ask the specific questions we do in our interviews with clients, by the way).
In short: to become the thought leader your market needs, you must first begin to see yourself as the person who makes a difference. As such, consider a quote that Emerson starts his essay Self Reliance with:
"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune
May your courage surmount your fears,
-Gerald