Demise of the Lay Man

There have been a bunch of different articles about authority and decentralized responsibility recently.

Mark Joyner recently put out a report called, “Rise of the Author”. It’s about how you’re automatically an expert if you publish a traditional book. He says you ought to do it soon because books are going out of style. But only do it if you want to be famous (probably not at all his point - that’s just what I got out of it).

Doctor Douglas wrote an article about how doctors are firing patients who do their own research and have concerns about diagnosis or prescribed medications.

Harlan Kilstein said NLP is dead because there haven’t been any industry wide advances or even cohesion recently.

Ryan Healy wrote about how we ought to make sure our hypnotists have enough training… or at least as much as our barbers.

And by now, you’re probably familiar with Michel Fortin’s report called, “Death of the Sales Letter.”

What’s the common denominator here? The death of the layman as we know him.

What’s the death of the layman?

When we talk about a layman, it’s with the assumption that people can be divided into two categories: the expert and the layman. The other assumption is that if you’re not an expert, your work is less valuable. In the academic community, you only have a valid opinion with a PhD.

What’s happening is that the internet is blurring the line between expert and layman. I recently met a financial planner who’s calibrated his NLP embedded commands to a high degree and sometimes uses them on his clients. How did he get so good? From reading books and practicing. He wasn’t of the opinion he needed an expert to tell him he was ready.

This isn’t to say that there is no place for the wise and experienced among us to practice our crafts. And there’s no question that all the different establishments held together by experts will continue on for some time yet. It simply means that if one person can do something, another can too. You don’t have to be an expert. NLP modeling can expedite that process but someone way back in the day had to figure out how to light a fire on their own too the first time.

In training to be a medic we finished our EMT basic certification the first 6 weeks of the training. Even so, our senior drill sergeant became famous for constantly telling us we weren’t medics yet. We were only about 40% a medic. And then about 75% a medic. And on and on. At graduation he said we were 100% a medic and competent enough in our skills to go out there and do something.

The good news is that you don’t have to wait to be christened an expert before you get going. The not-as-good news is that the upcoming generation of buyers and sellers don’t recognize the same marks of authority as previous generations. Keep in mind that Generation Y might as well mean, “Why?” as in, “Why should I listen to you at all about anything even if some people think you are a so-called expert?” Credentials won’t go as far as they used to.

I’m glad for it. There’s more opportunity for those of us willing to get up to speed.

Here’s to the death of the layman.