📄 The curse of the polymath: why being multi-talented can easily ruin your sales

Of course: being multi-talented - being a polymath - is a fantastic way to live:

When you have a wide range of skills, intellectual curiosity and a drive to learn, you end up with the ability to handle and solve very complex problems - the kind that to your buyer look so intractable, they wouldn't even know where to start.

And if you then also have one or two deep specialisations and you're able to really go to town solving problems, you would think that this makes for a very successful career as a coach or consultant.

But if you're that kind of person - a T-shaped professional - you've probably noticed that it isn't all that easy to land buyers.

Here you are, correctly diagnosing your buyer's very complex set of problems and challenges - and to you, with your varied skillset and deep specialisation, the problem is eminently solvable.

After all, you're that T-shaped professional, and you've spent decades developing your skills.

But somehow, for some reason, the buyers who most need your help often don't end up buying.

Even though their problem is urgent and painful and they have a budget, getting them over the line is a struggle.

When that happens, it's important to slow down, simplify, and break things down into graspable chunks.

Because your intelligent ability to wrap your mind around that complex set of problems might be exactly the reason that the sale doesn't close.

Your very polymath-nature itself might be exactly the reason why you give your buyer the wrong impression.

So, slow down. The more complex a buyer's problem is and the more varied the skillset required to solve it, the more you need to take your time to develop trust, and an understanding of how the different skillsets and approaches you'll deploy work together.