Take the reins and educate your peers

Once you have completed Malcolm Gladwell’s required hours of concentrated study to develop enough mastery to be considered an expert in any subject, consider paying it forward and sharing your knowledge with peers and others who would like to know what you know.

You don’t have to be freakishly good or a key-opinion-leader celebrity. Those people are the outliers. The experts are everyone else who has gained knowledge and passion for their subject while paying their 5,000 to 10,000 practice-hours dues.

Ellen Troyer

Practice makes experts

Willingness to put in huge amounts of deliberate practice and the ability to maintain this effort despite obstacles are required to develop expertise in any subject. Successful practice involves passion, goals, concentration and feedback from a teacher or mentor comparing actual to desired performance. Scientific evidence suggests that passion, persistence and practice can cause changes in the structure and function of the part of the brain that creates ability and expertise.

If practice and experience cause changes in the structure and function of the brain, then a crucial role of educating peers is to help motivate them to put in the effort required to become a passionate expert in their subject. Praising them for their efforts increases motivation and results in their valuing their challenges, which makes them better equipped to confront the obstacles that seem to get in the way of most everyone’s practice. Of this I’m sure because my mentor, Spencer Thornton, MD, constantly tells me how impressed he is with my nutrition science knowledge and how much he appreciates my commitment to my work. That praise serves to make me work harder, which makes me better at what I do.

Establishing yourself as an educator

Volunteer to share your passion, knowledge and time every chance you get. Trust me on this: Industry and nonprofit ophthalmic-focused organizations such as OWL are looking for people with expertise in a variety of subjects to mentor and showcase. Think of this as paying back and paying forward, as well as educational time well spent. It won’t take that long to become one of the educators they call on to get the job done. Those who have willingly paid their dues seem to find their way to the podium faster than others.

In today’s world, it’s also important to embrace social media if you want to become an educator. You can start sharing your knowledge and educating your peers by creating thoughtful content and posting it on a number of different ophthalmic industry blogs, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn. However, the social media fairies won’t start sprinkling your hopefully brilliant expertise across medicine and industry unless you post regularly. Consistency may matter most where social media is concerned.

Dare to come up with audacious ideas and become a follower of audacious thinkers

Fresh ideas can be the best tools we have to solve our toughest challenges — that’s the hope of the type of educational audacity we can count on from millennials, still-passionate corporate seniors and small-business owners who innovate frequently out of necessity.

I chair the OWL interest group Ophthalmic Women Business Owners, which is a classic example of an audacious group of women who recognized the value of the networking and collective-thought educational opportunities that would surface in our meetings. This special interest group is open to all OWL members, even if they are not owners of businesses. The learning and cross-fertilization that occur at these meeting may well inspire others to become business owners.

Develop a following

I write three short educational blogs a week for a large subscriber audience of eye doctors and their patients, nutrition science educators and others interested in the varied subjects I write about: nutrition science as it relates to eye and body health, the intersection of science, art, music and humanities, and personal experience creating and photographing easy and delicious "Tasty Tuesday" nutrient-dense recipe in the office kitchen.

My 2014 focus has been to convince eye doctors and their patients that making healthier lifestyle choices will either help prevent or slow the progression of a large percentage of degenerative and genetic diseases, including many diseases of the eye.

Education credibility requires that the educators practice what they preach so that’s always motivation for our management team and staff to eat well, take our vitamins and get plenty of daily exercise. This falls under the heading of being the person we are encouraging others to be.

Ellen Troyer, MT, MA, is CEO and Chief Research Officer of Biosyntrx Inc. and a board member of Ophthalmic Women Leaders.