dinosaurs

This is a cautionary tale.

One of the biggest dangers anyone of an entrepreneurial bend faces is starting to believe his own press. Ask any child star or former athlete and they’ll tell you just how quickly your crowds of adoring fans will turn into piles of year old fan mail.

Modern new media types have it even worse because unlike the truly famous most of us don’t have the benefit of an agent or manager to help reinvent our careers after the fallout. We are left wallowing alone in our stagnant consulting careers, tending the embers of barely updated Social Media profiles, chatting with others among the fallen about an industry that has left us behind and thinking about the golden years when we were relevant, when we were Gurus.

That’s why I can say in no uncertain terms that most of the Gurus of our current Social Media age will soon find themselves in the position where they are either forced to relinquish their title, along with the glam and glitter of jetsetting around the country chatting about the media social or they will find themselves in the same position that the Webmaster did in the late 90s.

Remember them?

They were the ones who had mastered HTML and could host your site, they knew how to use a FTP client and maybe even a little PERL. They were the magicians of an older age where static pages and animated .gifs made up the entirety of our web experience. Eventually they died out because we killed them, their skills filtered into dozens of other professions and understanding their magic became a basic cost of doing business. The lucky ones got out before the bubble burst and ended up as programmers or system administrators, for the rest it was a much more difficult transition as their high paying careers turned into object lessons in what happens when you fail to adapt.

At the end of the day, that’s what the most entrenched Gurus fail to realize — that our only truly marketable skill is our ability to change and grow along with technology and that the longer we spend looking inwards, enjoying the fruits of micro-celebrity and patting ourselves on the back for having “arrived,” the more likely it will be that when the next wave hits we’ll be sitting on the shore sipping a Pina Colada as it crashes on top of us.

You live and breath the industry you work in, its culture, its art, and your work as an entrepreneur is to grow in the use of that art. While cultivating your “brand” might help you sell yourself in the short run, cultivating your skills, your talents and your versatility is the only way to survive rapidly changing times.

So the next time you find yourself at your fifth Social Media mixer this month, chatting with other Gurus about the same topics that you talked about at last month’s five, ask yourself what you’re really learning, what you’re really producing and how you are adapting yourself to a world that’s constantly on the move because unfortunately there is nothing quite as final as extinction.

(Images)

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