When “good ideas spiral into dogma”

For better and for worse, we extrapolate success from one area to another. 

This is a smart thing to leverage in business and marketing. As creatives and freelancers, it’s difficult to get the flywheel spinning if we try to do too many things at once. This is why many business minds tell you to “niche down”—to stop telling your clients you can “do everything.” It confuses them, reduces their trust in you, and makes it harder for you to gain momentum. 

However, once you’ve gained success in one area, it’s easy to transfer that success to another area.  This is how great photographers become award-winning directors. This is how my business partner and I leveraged his social media success into a sustainable production company. Once you gain momentum on one track, it becomes easier to earn buy-in from people who help you change tracks. 

There’s a pitfall here. We can get into trouble when we extend this thinking beyond peripheral jumps. Just because someone is good at one thing, doesn’t automatically mean they’re good at something way different. James Clear recently wrote, “Beware the student of one teacher. A good idea spirals into dogma when it gets applied to everything and stretched beyond the areas where it is useful.”

It’s reasonable to assume that if someone writes memoirs well, they’ll write good business books, too. It’s less reasonable to assume that if someone has success in business, they’ll automatically be  productive in politics as well. 

Understand this frame. Learn how to leverage it for your own ventures. Learn to spot it when others do it. And most of all, beware the easy line of thinking that says just because someone is good at one thing, they’ll also be good at something way different.