In Part 1, I wrote about what happens when the title goes away.
No company name behind you.
No org chart.
No position quietly telling everyone in the room that they should probably listen.
You're left with your experience and your own voice.
Which raises another question.
What do you do with it?
I've been playing around with a simple test for that.
Know. Feel. Spark. Act.
Four words that sound suspiciously like something an engineer would put into a framework.
Old habits die hard.
But here's what I'm trying to get at.
If I write something, teach something, give a talk, have a conversation, or someday build a program around something I've learned, how do I know whether it was actually useful?
Not interesting.
Not impressive.
Useful.
That's a much higher bar.
And if you're trying to turn 30 or 40 years of experience into consulting, coaching, teaching, advising, or some kind of business of your own, I think it's a pretty important distinction.
You can know an enormous amount and still have trouble helping someone.
I've certainly managed it.
So here's what I mean by those four words.
First, know.
Usually, somebody has to learn something before they can do something differently.
That's the engineer's favorite part.
Give me the information.
Explain the system.
Show me the numbers.
For a big part of my career, I thought that was enough.
It isn't.
Because information has a bad habit of just sitting there.
We've all left a conference with a notebook full of brilliant ideas and changed absolutely nothing on Monday morning.
So there's a second piece.
Feel.
Does the person believe this is possible for them?
Do they care enough to try?
Does something about the idea connect beyond the intellectual level?
That consultant I mentioned in Part 1 figured this out long before I did.
"You can give them all the data you want, but they aren't going to move until they feel something."
I'm still unpacking that sentence.
Then there's spark.
This one may be the most interesting to me.
Did I give you my answer?
Or did something I said cause you to start thinking about your answer?
Those are very different things.
If all you can do after listening to me is repeat what I said, I'm not sure I've helped much.
But if something I said makes you look at your experience differently, see a possibility you hadn't seen, call someone you haven't spoken to in five years, or scribble an idea on the back of an envelope, now we're getting somewhere.
The idea has become yours.
And finally, act.
Did anything happen?
Did you make the call?
Write the proposal?
Start the website?
Have the conversation?
Try the experiment?
Take one small step toward whatever comes next?
Because at some point, all of this has to leave the notebook.
Know.
Feel.
Spark.
Act.
I like the framework.
I'm just not convinced it's right.
In fact, the more I think about it, the less certain I am that "know" belongs first.
Here's why.
I've been looking back at the things I've written over the years, trying to figure out what actually connected with people.
And I found something mildly irritating.
I had AI analyze my LinkedIn posts.
By far, the best-performing post I've ever written was basically one line from my own life.
I left John Deere nine years ago.
That was pretty much it.
No framework.
No five lessons.
No carefully researched explanation.
No "Here are three things every leader should know."
Just something that happened to me.
People responded.
Meanwhile, some of the posts I worked hardest on, the ones where I was trying to teach something useful?
Almost nobody cared.
There's nothing quite like spending three hours carefully explaining an idea and having the internet respond with the digital equivalent of clearing its throat.
So what does that mean?
Maybe my teaching posts weren't very good.
Entirely possible.
Maybe LinkedIn rewards stories.
Also possible.
Maybe people are naturally more interested in what happened to another human being than in being taught a lesson.
Or maybe I've had the order wrong.
What if the story comes first?
What if people feel something before they want to know something?
And what if the story itself is the teaching?
I'm not sure yet.
That's what makes this interesting.
I've started paying more attention to how other people communicate ideas.
Some friends of mine write screenplays.
I asked them about how they think about story, and I became fascinated by the constraints.
A screenplay can't wander around endlessly explaining itself.
Something has to happen.
People want something.
There's tension.
Things move.
Those constraints gave me ideas about communication I never would have found staring at another business-writing book.
Then, for reasons that probably surprise my younger self, I've been watching TikTok.
I'm not announcing my dance career just yet.
But you can't ignore what's happening there.
People are moving ideas in 30 seconds.
Sometimes very effectively.
They get your attention quickly, make a point, tell a tiny story, and they're gone.
Then you go to the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
I've listened to history podcasts that run for two hours.
Sometimes longer.
And I'll happily stay with them because they're taking me somewhere.
Nothing short about it.
Nothing particularly efficient either.
But it works.
Then there are Travis and Jason Kelce.
They're not sitting behind microphones saying, "Today we will teach you five important principles of professional football."
Thank goodness.
They're talking.
Telling stories.
Giving each other a hard time.
Laughing.
Going off on tangents.
And millions of people listen.
There may be information in there, but that's not really why people show up.
So I've been wondering:
What are those people doing in 60 seconds that I sometimes can't manage in 1,000 words?
And what are those podcasters doing for two hours that still keeps someone listening?
Short.
Long.
Written.
Spoken.
Scripted.
Loose.
Which one is right?
I've started thinking that's probably the wrong question.
The better question may be:
Which one serves the person I'm trying to help?
That's a different standard.
And it matters if you're trying to build something after corporate life.
Because when you've spent decades inside an organization, one of the first instincts is to package everything professionally.
Build the deck.
Create the framework.
Write the white paper.
Polish the website.
Make yourself sound like an expert.
I understand the instinct.
I've lived it.
But the irony is that when you're doing something on your own, people may be much more interested in the person than the polish.
They want to know what you've seen.
What you've tried.
What went wrong.
What surprised you.
What you know now that you wish you'd known 20 years ago.
That's not the same thing as telling old war stories.
The "good old days" aren't automatically useful.
Experience only becomes useful when someone else can see themselves in it.
That's the tension I'm trying to figure out.
How do you stay authentic without becoming self-indulgent?
How do you persuade without turning into somebody else's version of a salesperson?
How do you teach without sounding like you're standing at the front of a conference room with a laser pointer?
And maybe the biggest one for me:
Do I need to become a better writer?
Or should I lean harder into speaking, which has always felt more natural?
For a while, I've been treating that like a choice.
Maybe it isn't.
Which brings me, oddly enough, to Chaucer.
Stay with me.
I've been fascinated for years by the idea that much of what we now think of as old literature was built to be heard.
Stories were spoken.
Performed.
Passed along.
Eventually somebody wrote them down.
You can still hear the speaking inside some of that writing.
It's not polished the way we'd define polished writing today.
But it carries the story.
And I've been thinking about that a lot.
Maybe good writing doesn't have to sound "written."
Maybe the goal isn't to take the way I naturally speak and scrub all the humanity out of it until it sounds professional.
Maybe the goal is to get the person onto the page.
The pauses.
The questions.
The uncertainty.
The occasional detour.
The story you remember halfway through making the point.
Maybe that's not bad writing.
Maybe that's voice.
And for someone starting something new at 50, 60, or beyond, I think there's something freeing in that.
You don't have to suddenly become a copywriter.
You don't have to become an influencer.
You don't need to manufacture a "personal brand" that looks suspiciously like everyone else's personal brand.
You already have a voice.
You've been developing it for decades.
The work may simply be figuring out how to use it in a way that helps somebody else.
That's where I am with the usefulness test.
Know.
Feel.
Spark.
Act.
I still like the four.
I'm just much less certain about the order.
Maybe sometimes we feel first.
Maybe a story creates the spark.
Then we want to know more.
And only then do we act.
I'll probably keep messing with it.
That's part of the fun of building something new. Nobody handed me the playbook this time.
So I'll leave you with the question I've been asking myself:
When you've really helped someone learn something, what did they remember?
What you knew or what you'd been through?
