Don’t overlook the power of packaging your thought leadership in ways that are novel, creative, and memorable.
Simon Sinek, Mel Robbins, James Clear, and Brené Brown are four of the most influential thought leaders (and bestselling authors) over the past decade plus.
A common trait they share, and arguably one of the driving factors behind their success, is that not one of them invented the idea that made them famous. The concepts underlying the ideas they’re known for existed before they came onto the scene.
So, how did they become hugely famous?
They knew something that many attorneys and other professional services providers don’t: In thought leadership, personal branding, and communication generally, how you package your ideas can be as big a driver of their success as the ideas themselves.
This might sound like I’m discounting the success Sinek, Robbins, Clear, and Brown have achieved. I’m not. Coming up with ways to package ideas that are sexy and stick in people’s minds is hard work. Ideas that aren’t memorable or compelling won’t elevate their owners to a place of authority.
Sinek, Robbins, Clear, and Brown didn’t merely stand on the shoulders of others, copying their ideas. They reframed concepts already in the public sphere in novel ways, making them appealing to the masses and propelling themselves to stardom.
There’s a lesson there for attorneys and other professional services providers who are trying to become thought leaders and authorities in the areas of law they practice, the industries they serve, and the work they do.
Sinek, Robbins, Clear, and Brown gave established ideas fresh, memorable packaging
Let’s start with Simon Sinek. “Start with Why” was published in 2009. But for decades before, the idea of organizational purpose was well known.
For example, Peter Drucker and other management gurus in the mid-20th century suggested organizations focus on defining their “mission” (i.e., why they exist) instead of their “vision” (i.e., what they want to become). And, in their 1994 book “Built to Last,” Jim Collins and Jerry Porras published extensive research on “visionary companies” and argued that organizations with a “core ideology”—a mix of core values and a core purpose beyond making a profit—are more successful than those without one.
Sinek didn’t create the ideas underpinning the concept of “Start with Why”; he packaged them into “Start with Why.” He also repackaged these ideas into what he called “The Golden Circle,” and came up with the tagline, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” He took an established concept that wasn’t very sexy, breathed new life into it by giving it a sexy package, and rode that package to stardom.
How about Mel Robbins? The insight behind her empire is that you have to move before your brain talks you out of it. Psychologists have a name for this: “behavioral activation.” It’s the principle that action comes first and motivation follows, not the other way around.
That principle has been a staple of cognitive-behavioral therapy for decades, but nobody’s going to buy books with “behavioral activation” on the cover. No one’s going to sign up for a course titled “Best Practices for Behavioral Activation.” So Mel Robbins turned it around and packaged the idea as “The 5 Second Rule.”
Like Sinek, Robbins took an unsexy established principle and turned it into a ritual that anyone could adopt and make part of their everyday life. And now she just did it again with “Let Them,” two words that describe a piece of ancient Stoic philosophy about focusing on what we can control, specifically, Epictetus’ quote that “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
How about James Clear? His 2018 book, Atomic Habits, was built on a mountain of existing habit research, as he openly admits.
Charles Duhigg’s 2012 book The Power of Habit introduced the concept of the Habit Loop, which has three steps: a cue, a routine, and a reward. BJ Fogg, a Stanford researcher, developed a model of tiny habits, which led him to publish a book with the same name in 2019.
I’m sure Clear read Duhigg’s and Fogg’s writings, among others. He transformed these concepts into his own with sexy packaging and catchphrases. “Atomic habits.” “Get 1% better every day.” “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”
Like Sinek and Robbins, Clear repackaged existing concepts so effectively that Atomic Habits became the bible of habits. His packaging of habit-related scholarship has literally made him millions.
And finally, there’s Brené Brown. She’s an actual researcher. Shame, vulnerability, and courage are her academic pursuits. She built her work on “grounded theory,” a research method that develops theories directly from field data rather than testing pre-existing hypotheses. The method originated with sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss in the 1960s.
Plenty of people before Brown have studied shame and vulnerability. For example, Helen Block Lewis and June Tagney both studied the distinction between shame and guilt. Gershen Kaufman wrote extensively about the psychology of shame. Donald Nathanson explored shame as a core social emotion. Brown’s concept of “shame resilience” is her own packaging of decades of shame research.
Brown applied a fresh coat of paint to well-established concepts of shame and vulnerability. One of her novel packaging innovations was to flip the concept of vulnerability, reframing it as courage and not a weakness.
The thought leadership lesson to learn from Sinek, Robbins, Clear, and Brown
Simon Sinek, Mel Robbins, James Clear, and Brené Brown took well-established ideas and did one or more of four things:
- They gave them or closely related concepts new packaging they created and owned, like the “Golden Circle” or “Atomic Habits”;
- They compressed these ideas and concepts into catchphrases you could repeat without thinking;
- They attached them to something concrete: a number, a shape, an action you can take today; and
- They added a twist that made them even more memorable, such as “Start with why” or “Vulnerability is strength.”
They followed a recipe for packaging and framing ideas in memorable ways: You name an idea, you distill it, you make it physical, and you give it a little bit of a twist.
To be fair, I will not pretend that their framing and packaging of their ideas was the only reason they’re so successful. They also got lucky with timing: TED talks, podcasts, Instagram, and other efficient ways for distributing their ideas all showed up at the right time for them. In addition, all four have been distributing their work relentlessly for years. But their phrasing and packaging drove much of their success by making their takes on well-known subjects memorable and sticky in their audiences’ minds.
That’s something many attorneys and other professional services providers ignore when producing thought leadership, which is why they should learn this lesson from these four (and others): Innovative, sticky packaging can breathe new life into pedestrian ideas, transforming them into memorable ones that can catapult the authority of an attorney or another professional.
When you’re using thought leadership to build your authority, your practice, and your book of business, you need to come to the table with ideas. Without ideas, viewpoints, and the occasional “hot take,” there’s no thought leadership.
But never forget that how you frame and package your ideas is part of thought leadership too. Your ideas, on their own, might be relevant and valuable to your clients. But how you package and frame them could make you and them memorable and change the trajectory of your career.