A chai wallah does one thing: he makes tea.

He makes tea day in and day out. Over and over.

I remember when I was in India how the chai wallahs would enter the trains at every stop and each had their own way of calling “chai”. They would squeeze up and down the aisles with their pots and glasses, at all hours of the day or night (you never got a quiet time). They would shout about their chai is such a way that the words ceased having meanings and became a song.

They were all experts at the same thing, making tea, but they each had their own way of doing it.  (For a wonderful website devoted to the chai experience in India, visit chai pilgrimage.)

Are You Willing to Become a Wallah?

To become a wallah, you must specialize.  Avoid distraction and do the same thing over and over until you become good at it.  And after you have repeated it over and over, your own unique mark will develop.

Focus on one thing and ignore the rest until you become good at it.

“When you go all in, it focuses your attention and effort, doesn’t it?”

—Seth Godin in his blog post Chai Wallah

If you focus your attention, practice until you’re crazy, you come up with your expert call.  You will become a internet business wallah.

You can’t reach success without failure.

I never knew that you had to fail to succeed.

When I was growing up, I was taught that failure was, well, failure.  Failure was not supported.  Failure was something to be ashamed of.

It has only been though building a business that I have made friends with failure.  I fail.  I get up.  I move on.

I just saw a training video and in it, I learned that I don’t need to be an expert to create a business, I just need to know a little more than the person I’m helping.

I believe this. I love how we can all extend a hand to the person behind us while grabbing the hand of the person in front. It is through the helpful hands around us that we grow.

I love shedding light on someone’s problem.

I love being the one who comes up with the solution.

But does being one step in front of someone make me an expert?

I picked up a very controversial book from the library, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values” by Andrew Keen. The title made me gulp.

The book is written by a self-proclaimed elitist. He feels there is a very different, very tangible difference between the advice you find in an article on Wikipedia, written by an amateur, and an article by a professeur who has studied a topic for decades.

When everyone becomes an expert and hosts their own private YouTube channel, quality suffers, he claims.

At first blush, I am appalled. Haven’t we all had experiences where the kid next door fixes the computer problem that your “expert” missed? Your Aunt Joan paints pictures that rivel anything you’ve seen in a museum.

Proclaimed “experts” have let us down countless times.

Yet–perhaps he has a point.

When I take a yoga class, I can feel a tangible difference in the teaching from the teacher who has lived, breathed and eaten yoga for years, with the one who thinks yoga is cool.

When I listen to talk radio, I may be intrigued with the caller’s questions, but it’s the expert who has been in the trenches for years who gives me the insights I value the most.

I can get help from anyone who knows more than I, but there is “solidness”, a depth, an authority to the person who has mastery.

And a master is rare.

I think we can all be helpful to each other. I think we all pocess expertise. But to be a master, to contribute to the world in a unique way, you must have more. You must have a devotion to your topic which makes you stand out among the crowd.

We can all become an expert at something. But will we all become a master?