Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Hello again, Tinker. To address your question, "What would it take to ‘teach the world a word,'" I will tell you what I tell every entrepreneur with a new product who asks me how to sell a million (not saying you want to "sell" the word, but the answer is the same for your case, too): You do it by selling the first one first and then do that a million times. Making it specific to your problem, you teach the world a word by teaching one person first.

Here's why this is important. First, teaching (substitute selling for teaching for other products) is an individual thing. It loses its meaning when you abstract it to populations with means and standard deviations. The world is not made up of 6.7 billion "average" beings, but instead 6.7 billion individuals. By looking at it this way, you arrive at a teaching process that must be flexible enough to take into account individual differences.

Second, in taking on the goal of teaching the first person, you must actually start. You will fail, learn from the experience, apply the learning to the next person, fail again, make more changes to the process, and then finally gain success. You will find the process that works. Not every time - you will fail again. But you will have learned the process of optimizing the process for individual differences, learn to look for those differences, and adapt before you start teaching.

Third, in teaching individuals, you create advocates who will help you teach. This works particularly well if you teach and then teach them to teach. It used to be that the only way to make a word global was to spend lots of money. McDonald's and Nike did that. Today, that's old school. With Generation X to some degree and in particular, Generation Y, traditional marketing still works, but what really works is social networking and word of mouth buzz.

So, begin your quest with teaching the first individual, learn the process of teaching and anticipating the differences in individuals and how to taylor the teaching method to account for those differences, and then teach those you taught to do the same. If you teach them and they learn, they will be likewise passionate about spreading the word and go on to teach. Given that the word is as you say, the process should be self-fueling and in time, everyone knows the word.

Start this right now. You have tried to teach individuals on this post and on others here. Pull yourself back from yourself and analyze the process. What did you do and why weren't the results as you hoped they would be? Take into account that since you are working with only written words here, the teaching process is sort of uni-dimensional. But even so, you can learn from the tries. Then, go out and engage a person one-to-one. After each try at teaching and individual, pull back from yourself and take a look at the process and the gap from your desired result. Make modifications to improve and go out and do it again. Oh, one other important point: When you are teaching the initial individuals, make sure you listen more than talking. You want to get their feedback on the word and your process of teaching it. Value their feedback, for, each objection they give you allows you to learn and be one step closer to your goal of teaching the world the word.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

I'm not suggesting going the way of religion. Few products, politicians, speakers, etc etc, have gone from unknown to household name with immediate success. You start with small audiences, and grow your momentum. As I stated in a prior post, I'd market it as the Secret, as James Ray, and others. Not religion, not scripture, but all for a higher good and continual self improvement.