If Da Vinci had a website

Renaissance thinkers were multi-disciplinary. The formal name for their eclectic interest and diverse specialties, was polymath. I wrote about how I believe that Thought Leaders are polymaths (or need to be) previously on my blog. This is a big idea and one that requires you to invest a little because it’s counter cultural. It’s not the story of our society right now, yet it is absolutely key to fixing a dilemma that many experts share. ‘When I do so much, how do I answer the question, what do I do?’

 

If this were an essay or a chapter in a book I’d expand on the elements that contribute to this dilemma; there would be references to the industrial age and the push for specialisation, there would be a discussion about the flawed logic of niche marketing and it’s inapplicability to the solo brand. There would be discussions about becoming fully expressed and self-actualised and the negative impact narrowing has on this, but since this is a newsletter and blog post, I’ll get to the point.

 

As a Thought Leader, your personal website should showcase your width of knowledge. It should create a pattern of projects that once viewed, identify your expertise as a META idea, not a series of technical matters. Stay big and find a way to represent what you do that has integrity (you really are an expert in it), diversity (it’s wide ranging in it's applications) and self expression (it’s stuff that you are juiced by).

 

We are in such uncharted territory with this because Da Vinci and Michelangelo did not have websites. If they did, they most certainly would not be long form sales letters focused on just one market. They would be portals of personality showcasing a diverse thinker, with mastery in a number of disciplines and an essential recurring essence that appears in all that they do.Their ideas would evolve over time and be set up as projects that showcase what inspired them at a particular point in time.

 

So, what is your website saying about you?

P.S. Come and spend a day with me on Powerful Positioning. I’ll help you, amongst other things, to answer the question ‘What do you do?’ in way that rocks the planet!