Good Advice From Steve Pavlina: Contribute to your Field
I’m a regular reader of Steve Pavlina’s famous and long-running personal development blog. His personal life, not so much, but he has some classic posts about business and life that I just love. His is the only blog I have ever printed out pages (1 post can be 5 pages easy) and read and underlined. I’m not sure why I haven’t read his book!
Today’s post is excellent and resonated with me. It’s about contributing to your field and how much it adds to your life and business. He started in a solitary kind of field, which is tough on an extrovert. So after watching what the most visible and connected people in his field did he decided to get more involved:
“I noticed that the people I respected most in the software and computer gaming fields — and the people who seemed to be the most well-networked — were frequent and generous contributors. These were the people who spoke at conferences, wrote articles for magazines and journals, and published books. They didn’t just work for themselves. They passed on their knowledge and helped to elevate everyone in the field…by and large, these people weren’t pounding the pavement to make new friends and contacts. Quite the contrary — people were constantly coming to them. They acted like magnets, attracting others to them with ease.”
People who contribute see themselves as working for everyone – what they do and who they are is to contribute. There’s a sense of altruism which elevates what they do and ultimately benefits them too. When you speak, rather than wondering how many books you can sell or what you’ll get from it, think of it as a contribution. When you teach think of it that way too. It will be more fulfilling to you and to your audience. Really social networking works as inbound marketing when approached from this angle.
Other classics on Steve’s blog:
- A 12-post series on networking with busy people. It gives you insight into the mind of successful people.
- If you’ve followed “The Secret” it can get a little “woo woo” read his articles on manifesting (particularly money). Here’s another one.
I really think it’s about thought training for positive results and as Landmark Education calls it “living in possibility.” I need to practice both more regularly.
Thanks you Steve for contributing and for reminding me to. One thing I’ve gotten from reading your blog is that it gives me permission to be myself (which in itself is a contribution).
Please comment. What ways have you or what ideas do you have to contribute to your field? Or, alternatively, who do you admire who does this well?
Related articles
- How Your Ears Affect Your Bottom Line (eon.businesswire.com)
- Do You Need To Develop Personally To Market on The Net? (self-improvement-tips.org)
3 Responses to “Good Advice From Steve Pavlina: Contribute to your Field”
Leave a Reply
April 10th, 2010 at 11:29 am
ShoeMoney Rocks!
May 3rd, 2010 at 2:06 pm
“Living in possibility” … I like that.
I just did a roundup of Lessons Learned from Steve Pavlina and came across your post. Very nice distillation.
May 9th, 2010 at 4:19 am
this is a nice complimentary post for steve pavlina