Yesterday my intern and I had the good fortune to get tutored by an expert in online marketing for authors: Fauzia Burke. We paid her for this session, and it was worth every penny. We emerged from the 40 minutes we spent with her online with a long list of mostly simple things we could do to sell more copies of my books When In Doubt, Ask for More and Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind. (Previously I have shared my own marketing tips for frugal authors and what I learned about self-publishing and publishing in general while writing my last two books.)
Among many other insights we gained from Fauzia, I learned for the first time about Bookshop.org, an online bookseller dedicated to supporting independent bookstores and that is already selling my book. (I have since set up my own online shop on their site where I “stock” my own books and also books written by others that I love.) This experience caused me to reflect on a few related topics.
I paid for an expert’s input and then began applying it immediately. It seems so obvious. But we live at a time when some political leaders ignore, dismiss, or even ridicule experts and expertise. It is the source of many of the problems our society faces today.
The process of humbling oneself enough to listen to experts is something akin to a nonprofit leader seeking the advice of a donor, board member, or colleague. Few things are simpler or more helpful in terms of building trust and rapport. A leader who asks for advice shows that they are curious and in search of better ideas than they can come up with alone – which most people see as very positive qualities (especially in executives, who are prone to feeling overconfident). Furthermore, leaders who ask for advice often flatter those whom they ask for advice from, which tends to make them feel valued and draws them closer to the organization’s mission. And this is to speak nothing of the fact that leaders who ask for advice often get great ideas from others !
These examples reminded me of an essential truth that I took away from Yuval Noah Hariri’s book Sapiens: that the root of much human progress over the last few hundred years was (ironically perhaps) the recognition of our collective ignorance. In explaining the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, he writes, “…until about 1500 AD, humans the world over doubted their ability to obtain new medical, military and economic powers. While government and wealthy patrons allocated funds to education and scholarship, the aim was, in general, to preserve existing capabilities rather than acquire new ones.”
He goes to write, “Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ignoramus – ‘we do not know’. It assumes that we don’t know everything. Even more critically, it accepts that the things we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge….
“The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known… [To them,] it was inconceivable that the Bible, Qur’an or Vedas were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe – a secret that might yet be discovered by flesh-and-blood creatures.”
So, the message here is – embrace expertise and the source of much expertise: the willingness to admit one’s ignorance. Oh, and also — buy my new book and review it on Amazon (Fauzia says it helps a lot!).