How are you growing your ‘specific knowledge’ for your personal brand? (3 Tips)

Following the masses makes you replaceable. Getting specific is what makes you inimitable. It builds a moat around your personal brand’s competitive edge.

Just like in business, your intellectual capital underpins your personal brand. So, what comes to mind when you think about the knowledge you offer the marketplace, your business or people? Is it generic - possessed by many others in your field? Or, is it unique to you? Is it ‘specific knowledge’?

What is your ‘specific knowledge’?

The Almanack of Navi Ravikant highlights the importance of ‘specific knowledge’. Ravikant describes specific knowledge as knowledge you can’t be trained for. Because, if society can train someone else in it, it can also replace you.

It is valuable knowledge specialised to you and your circumstances. It comes from your innate talents and interests.

Personal branding tells us there is no one just like you. No one with your unique set of skills, experience, interests and background. It calls for you to use this to define your niche - what you could be a subject matter expert in. Forming the foundation of the unique problem only you can help solve. But, specific knowledge becomes an even more interesting premise.

While others can also share your subject matter expertise, your ’specific knowledge’ starts to form your truly unique category of one.  As Warren Buffet famously emphasises, this is like building a moat to protect your competitive advantage.

Instead of responding to calls to follow your passion - an unhelpful suggestion for many - focus on building your specific knowledge.

Tip #1: Cultivating your personal brand’s specific knowledge

One of my favourite quotes is of Mahatma Gandhi saying:

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Learning so often ends once it stops being mandatory or after obtaining a piece of paper. This instead calls for lifelong learning.

Take reading, for example. Here are some sobering statistics:

In 2019, the Pew Research Centre reported the following in the United States:

• 24% of adults haven’t read a book in the last year.

• Reading is directly correlated to wealth and education level.

• Adults with a high school diploma or less are five times as likely to not have read a book in the last year, compared to college graduates.

• 37 percent of those with a high school degree or less had not read, compared to 7 percent of those with a college diploma.

In my earlier blog, I shared how I’ve spent years reading at least one book a week. But, the number is just a ‘vanity metric’. What matters is the habit.

Some knowledge dates and industries continue to progress. So, whether it’s reading, podcasts, videos or other learning, how are you continuing to cultivate your specific knowledge?

Tip #2: Be specific and general simultaneously

Remember, specific knowledge is formed not just in the narrow lens of your field. But, in your unique combination of interests. So, how are you building interdisciplinary knowledge? In their book, The Unfair Advantage, Ash Ali and Husan Kubba propose this is how creativity is formed:

“Creativity is largely about training your mind to connect things you learn in one domain to situations that seem completely unrelated. This is known as intersectional or interdisciplinary thinking.”

Learn to master the art of niching down, while also building your general knowledge and its applicability.

Tip #3: Sharing your personal brand’s specific knowledge

Some of the greatest thought leaders valiantly advocate for others to share their knowledge too.

Global digital sensation, Gary Vaynerchuk, famously calls for you to:

“Document, don’t create.”

Don’t wait for some idealistic version of your personal brand vision to eventuate before you start sharing your knowledge. But, rather document the journey toward your vision. Don’t hide away until you’ve reached (your version of) the “top”. Rather, invite others to learn with you and get to know the person you’re becoming in your journey.

In Real Artists Don’t Starve, Jeff Goins also champions sharing your work. Proposing that the ‘thriving artist’, as opposed to the ‘starving artist’, practises in public.

Ravikant himself discusses the concept of building leverage while you build your skills. Discussing some key principles of personal branding, he says:

“You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world, they need a skill set, and you’re uniquely qualified. You build your brand in the meantime on Twitter, on YouTube, and by giving away free work. You make a name for yourself, and you take some risk in the process. When it is time to move on the opportunity, you can do so with leverage—the maximum leverage possible.”

Finally, Tiago Forte discusses the importance of ‘expression’ in his book Building a Second Brain. The premise for the ‘second brain’ is that knowledge should be stored externally to your mind. Forte presents his ‘CODE’ framework to manage this. In it, sharing your work forms the last crucial step in your own processing:

• C - Capture

• O - Organise

• D - Distill

• E - Express

When it comes to your personal brand, make your knowledge personal to you. Don’t blindly follow the masses. Only reading the bestsellers or tuning into the top-rated channels. The real value is created by getting specific. In unexpected combinations. Developing knowledge unique to only you.

So, what is your specific knowledge?