---
title: "Cultivating an Expertise"
description: "For anyone at the beginning or the middle of a career, deciding where to invest the hours."
author: "Rahim Rasul"
type: "Podcast episode"
series: "Halftime Talks"
episode: 78
published: "2016-02-11"
duration: "17 min"
theme: "Work and mentors"
tags: "expertise, career, evergreen skills, profession"
audio: "https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/rahimrasul/HTT078_Cultivation_Expertise.mp3?dest-id=175061"
url: "https://iloveprocess.com/halftime/cultivating-an-expertise/"
site: "I Love Process"
---

# Cultivating an Expertise

_For anyone at the beginning or the middle of a career, deciding where to invest the hours._

**The question:** What is it going to take to perform at a high level to be as impactful as possible?

Listen: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/rahimrasul/HTT078_Cultivation_Expertise.mp3?dest-id=175061

## Before you listen

This talk is about expertise and how we identify ourselves within the economy. It names eight categories that have held across economies and across time: expertise and insights; pipeline; experience providers; connectors, facilitators and vendors; leaders; creators; engineers; and service and support.

It began as a conversation I wanted to have with my younger self. I was a Flash developer, and I devoted sleepless nights to a code architecture I would never use again, a fad. The word profession is rooted in profess: to declare openly, to declare allegiance with a category. So the talk walks through each one, from the pipeline that moves a product to its audience to the engineers who keep systems running, and asks you to claim a primary category and a secondary one.

Listen for the questions to ask of whoever is leading the pack in your space, and for the parting challenge to curate the insights of the people who paved the way and documented the challenges they saw.

## From the talk

> You can either invest in becoming a tool where you're the person that does it, or you can invest in impact.
>
> By cultivating these kinds of evergreen skills, you have impact no matter the time.
>
> These skills do not wash off with the rain.

## Sit with this

- What separates the mediocre from the exceptional?
- What challenges are they currently solving?

## Transcript

So to begin the Episode I, I thought I'd want to tell you what inspired this episode and through a little bit of his story, hopefully, you know exactly where I'm trying to lead you with some of the ideas that I formulated for this episode. And so this episode was inspired by conversations, not only with myself, peers, and people I've mentored, but ultimately what inspired this is a desire to have a conversation with my younger self of sorts. I look back into my career, and it's kind of hodgepodge. And it's, it's bounced around in a couple of different places. I've invested a lot of time. And some things that if I had a chance to do it again, I'd probably do it a tad bit different.

And that's more specifically, I used to be this Flash developer and I, I probably had spent and invested a lot of time in learning a code architecture that I'd never use again. And I've devoted a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of time of sorts, into a trend into a fad. And it's really interesting looking back, that I specialize in and that was one of my specialties. And so ultimately, what this episode is, is really here to do is, is to make sure you you gain the most efficient use of your, your time and your investment, you can either invest in becoming a tool where you're the person that does it, or you can invest in impact. And you can get it done. By cultivating these kinds of evergreen skills, you have impact no matter the time.

The categories which I will define are eternal, they're evergreen. Throughout all economies, throughout time, these have been prevailing categories and areas of expertise that people have cultivated. These categories these skills do not wash off with the rain, their fundamentals. So no matter if you're at the beginning of your career or you find yourself in the middle of your career. These categories can give you direction they can give you an ability to to focus and to refine your research and to understanding how you can prove yourself invaluable. So the first thing I want to do is I want to define and I want to play around with the word profession, if you break it down, is rooted in the word, profess profess. Also you have professors, you have profession.

And if we look at the word Professor We will discover the relationship with the professional the career aspect of it. And by scanning over this definition, you see that it is a definition that states to declare openly to affirm to declare allegiance with a category. And so that's what I really want you guys to do right now I want you to listen to some of these categories and identify with one of them identify with one of them, there will be a primary one. And they'll also be most likely some secondary or tertiary categories that you're closely affiliated with. So the next thing I'm going to do are go through these categories. You have number one, you have expertise and insights. Number two, you have pipeline.

Number three, you have experienced providers. Number four, you have connectors, facilitators, and vendors. Number five, you have leaders. Number six, you have creators. Number seven, you have engineers. And lastly, number eight, you have service, and support. So with each of these categories, I'm gonna go into further detail in a second. But what you have are categories which are able to leverage value on the marketplace. And within our capitalistic system, we collectively defined worth as a function of how much value we contribute to the marketplace. Thus leveraging that skill to earn a compensation primarily in the form of wage and salary. Our ultimate goal is to prove ourselves indispensable, and elastic as we demonstrate and express that value. Now, with that covered, I'm going to dive into these these areas of expertise.

But while I go through these, I want you to begin to think about who are leading the pack and the spaces either individuals or companies, what challenges are they currently solving? What challenges have they solved, and what separates the mediocre from the exceptional. And as you begin to think about that also reflect of how that impacts where you are and where you could be in the space. The first one I'm going to talk about is the pipeline. Now the pipeline is the distribution medium that traffic's the product from supply to consumer, the pipeline itself is an asset. And you would hope that you have great products moving through this network, they tend to specialize in logistics, operations, attention to detail is a must, because they also work in volume and scale.

And they're the gatekeepers to the audience. So you have companies that come to mind easily, you think of a pipeline like Walmart, or Amazon. But I also want to contend that companies like Facebook, are pipeline with a 1 million 1 billion user audience, their pot their product, are you and I and we are sold to the advertisers for their own marketing and advertising, Spotify saying 75 million users 20 million paid subscribers, you also got to look at the distribution methods of email, or the individuals with a big fan base on Twitter, or Instagram, your pipeline are your audience, the people that you have the attention of that come back and back, even websites you are their traffic, therefore, you're the product that they sell to marketers and advertisers.

Number two, we're going to be talking about connectors, facilitators and vendors. The most easily recognizable of these are sales retail, you have things like financial services, you also have agents D their traits tend to be extroverts. They understand value and worth. They have high EQ and great people oriented skills, they tend to be confident and they have their fingers on the pulse of the market. Now selling they're actually good at storytelling and painting the picture of possibility and bringing products and services to life. They lean on their networks, their networks are very important. And they also tend to be very charismatic. Number three, expertise and insight This class specializes in pushing the envelope. We're talking about specialists, not generalists. People who have acquired knowledge and know how to communicate it in an actionable and meaningful ways which create impact.

What we're talking about are an information economy, a niche of specialized knowledge. These tend to be consultants, teachers, lawyers, philosophers, analysts, intellectuals. Now, since their primary relationship is with knowledge and skills itself, they tend to be introverts give and take. Some of them really know how to communicate, others are really just lost in the subject matter. And don't know how to bring it down to an ordinary conversation, that curious, and that drives their research, they have high pattern recognition are able to bring together disparate ideas and see the continuity between them. Critical thinking is a high point, focus gets it done. And curiosity keeps the wheels turning. Number four, we have creators, these creators pioneer new spaces that haven't existed before they create industry, they create products within industries, they segment into new spaces, they don't require consensus as permission to push for.

These are innovators. These are entrepreneurs. These are inventors, they're solving problems that sometimes haven't even been articulated, even though they've been felt, the need has been presented, even if we haven't articulated, that need fully. And that's where the creators come into play. The next form of expertise are engineers. Now, it's the engineers role to fix existing systems, keep it going improve upon maximize the efficiency of the system. Now, there's a lot of different kinds of engineers, doctors or engineers of the human body, you have software engineers, who are the ones that write the code. And the ones who improve upon existing code. You have hardware engineers, you have systems engineers, you have mechanical engineers, who keep the systems going now, to be an engineers also to be similar to somebody that we will consider.

People have expertise and insights, except that there there's more of an application based understanding, and they're able to fix things, keep things going and improve upon things. So they're traits, they tend to be curious. They tend to be problem solvers. And they also are very curious. The next area of expertise are leaders. Leaders are those unique individuals that are able to manage the vision of an undertaking, be that human resources or material resources and carry out the vision. These are business management, you have politicians, religious leaders, teachers, social movement leaders, they're kind of the heads of the institution, be that family, business, different kinds of groups, and also educational. There's a understanding of human psychology and human behavior, there is a high ability to relate with people.

So therefore, their EQ, they have a high empathy, and are also able to communicate the seventh area of expertise, our experience providers, they create a world for us to escape within and allows our mind to release its grass from the present. And we get to explore and appreciate some of the finer nuances of life. And these are arts, hospitality, travel, food, fashion, music, creativity, there, they tend to be a more creative class, a class that's really trying to ignite your senses smell, taste, touch, emotion. And they're imaginative. They're thinking outside the box. So that's the experience providers, and the last but not lease area expertise, or service providers. Now, the number one role of the service provider is to clear the way A for the expertise to be carried out smoothly.

These are these call centers, these are accounting, these are project management, all of these act in support of the mission. Without them, some of the things have slipped through the cracks. So this is the final area of expertise. Given what I've shared, I want to leave a parting challenge. I want to challenge you to identify your primary area of expertise, and even your secondary one. I want you to ask yourself, what is it going to take to perform at a high level to be as impactful as possible? Then I want you to imagine the advantage of curating the insights from the experience of others who paved the way who solved the business challenges who've seen the challenges and have documented it along the way.