Professor Sean Wise reaches one million reads

Congratulations to Professor Sean Wise for reaching more than a million reads on his column with Inc. Magazine! 

Professor Wise, who teaches in the Entrepreneurship & Strategy department at the Ted Rogers School of Management, is an expert on startups and venture capital. He’s been writing actionable pieces for entrepreneurs for more than two years and has written over 100 articles for Inc., an American business magazine.

Wise answered a few questions about his journey to a million reads, what this milestone means to him and how Stan Lee influenced his writing.

Here is what he had to say:

How and why did you start writing for Inc. Magazine?

Part of being a professor is about the dissemination of knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge is finding ways to find your reader where they are. So once upon a time, readers we're in peer reviewed journals and now they're on Twitter and so Inc. approached me about taking my writings from the book and into more of a weekly kind of column for them. 

What has been your favourite thing about writing this column? 

So, the articles that have really done the most for me are sort of at the center of a Venn diagram. I like to take really complicated things, whether they be pedagogies or business models or technology and make them really simple. I'm able to simplify complicated topics. The second thing is that I use sources that are beyond reproach. I do a lot of work taking research that comes out of MIT, that comes out of Harvard, that comes out of Ryerson and try to disseminate it to a larger audience as to how it applies. So actionable stories are really important, simple and actionable. And then finally I write about things I'm interested in. As a professional investor, I'm always interested in startups and entrepreneurs and this column really gives me a platform to sort of pursue that. So I'll give you an example. When I wanted to know about the value of crowdfunding a book, I went out to the entrepreneur who was a number one book crowd funder and I got a great interview. Using [the column] sort of allowed me to get access to something really fascinating to me and then my readers got to benefit.

What has the response to your writing been like?

It's been really good, I was once giving a lecture at Michigan State and a student in the audience came up and said that they identified with a column (external link)  I wrote about Stan Lee. So obviously Stan Lee is a big hero of mine, I'm a big superhero fan and person interested in that sort of thing. So I was talking about the Stan Lee approach of every hero has a weakness and I was talking about my own learning disability and I guess that helped this student face her problems. I guess that really highlights something that I find quite incredible. My learning disability makes it very difficult for me to write. And so I do a lot of writing but I use an editor and I bring in a proofreader to help me copy edit. And so I think that's a really important thing because I could just as easily be worried about my learning disability and never publish anything. But instead, I focus on the things that I'm good at and let others support me in the way that they do and I think that's really important. 

Has this experience impacted your teaching or research in any way?

A lot of what I write is stuff I'm interested in (entrepreneurship and new startups), and so it informs me of that and it keeps me up to date. One of the difficulties when you stop working in industry is that you can lose touch. But my writing keeps me very much front and center in the field of entrepreneurship.

What does this milestone mean to you? 

To me it's about planning the work and working the plan. I tell that to my students - it's about how does someone do this? Going out and finding role models, reverse engineering what they did, and then most importantly, understanding that it would take a number of years, I didn't think it was going to take 30 days. Hard work, not once in a while, but every day. So then I summarize that as “you plan the work and you work the plan.” You reverse engineer from where you want to be and then execute daily and eventually all your hard work pays off. I've written articles that were brilliant that no one read and I’ve written articles that weren't very good and people loved them. The key is not to be perfect, the key is to just get better every day.