This month I crossed 500,000 learners on LinkedIn Learning. And if you add up every cohort, every corporate session, every conference workshop and one-off engagement over almost ten years of doing this, it’s many thousands more on top of that.
I’m not writing this to flex. A number that big mostly just makes you stop and take inventory: what’s actually worked, what was a waste of time, and what I’d tell somebody who’s about to teach their very first class. So here’s the unvarnished version, lessons I’d have killed to have on day one.
(Quick aside before the lessons: a good chunk of those half a million accessed those courses free through their public library card. LinkedIn Learning is free with a library card in a lot of states, my home state of Ohio included. Libraries are humanity-affirming institutions and I’m proud my stuff lives behind one.)
Don’t do everything yourself
This is the big one, so it goes first. The skill that got you here, knowing Excel cold, understanding the tools, being able to explain the thing, is not the same skill as editing videos, designing thumbnails, writing landing pages, running the funnel, fixing the LMS, troubleshooting microphones, managing registrations, and fifteen other things you will somehow convince yourself you have to own.
You don’t.
If you don’t like making videos, find people who do. If editing drains the life out of you every single time, that is not a character flaw. That is a signal. If a piece of the work consistently makes you procrastinate, dread the project, or turn what should be a good teaching idea into a six-month ordeal, maybe that part should not be yours forever.
You are not a one-person production studio, and the sooner you stop pretending to be one, the more of the actual teaching you get to do.
Everything follows a Pareto curve no matter what
Learners, revenue, engagement, comments, referrals, course sales, course completions, all of it follows the same basic pattern. A small slice of your output drives most of your reach. A small slice of your audience drives most of the interaction. A small slice of your clients drives most of the revenue. That is just how this works, and you can make yourself crazy trying to fight it.
But the Pareto curve is great for quantity. It is not the same thing as quality. Volume can get you scale, reputation, and the big number on the profile, but it does not automatically get you depth, income, alignment, or the right clients.
Do not confuse a big top-line number with “I have made it.” More on that at the end.
Your most rabid fans take the courses nobody else takes
This one has surprised me over and over. The courses that create the deepest connection are often not the giant obvious ones. They are the niche ones, the weirdly specific ones, the “who is even going to watch this?” ones. The advanced topic you almost did not bother making because you figured maybe three people on earth would care.
Those three people are often your true believers.
The mass-appeal courses bring the crowd, and that matters. I am not too cool for the crowd. But the oddball deep cuts are where you find the people who really care about the same corners of the world you do.
Make some of those on purpose. Do not only chase the topic with the biggest obvious audience. Sometimes the best work is the stuff that is just specific enough to make the right person say, “Oh wow, this was made for me.”
Good audio beats almost everything
I am only half joking when I say audio trumps everything else in a course. Nobody quits because your video is not 4K. They quit because they cannot stand listening to you.
Bad audio makes everything feel worse. It makes good material feel amateur. It makes a smart instructor feel hard to trust. It makes a learner tired before they even realize why they are tired.
Spend on a decent microphone before you spend on a nicer camera, fancier graphics, animations, or whatever else. Clear, warm, listenable audio will carry a course further than slick visuals ever will. I love a nice visual as much as the next Excel nerd, but people are going to spend a lot of time with your voice. Make that experience pleasant.
You don’t have to script every word, especially now
I used to think everything had to be locked down verbatim. Every word scripted, every demo rehearsed, every sentence polished until there was no life left in it.
It doesn’t, and trying to make it that way is how you end up shipping nothing.
This is especially true now. Excel is moving fast. The AI layer sitting on top of Excel is moving even faster. “Perfect and permanent” is a fantasy in this space, so ship your thinking. That does not mean ramble, and it does not mean be sloppy. It means accepting that the exact button, interface, feature name, or Copilot behavior may change, but your judgment, framing, and sense of what matters will still be useful.
The value is not that you created a museum piece that took six months to over-polish. The value is that you helped someone think through the problem better. In the AI world especially, everyone already assumes the specifics are going to date, and that is fine. The easiest people to work with, the best editors, partners, clients, and learners, understand this.
They are not looking for a frozen artifact. They want your judgment. Your framing. Your sense of what matters.
That is much harder to date.
Meet people where they are
Be approachable. Obviously beginners need that, but I think people misunderstand this point. They assume “beginner-friendly” means watered down, and “advanced” means complicated, dense, and full of jargon.
Nope.
Experts like clarity too. A seasoned Excel pro still enjoys watching another pro frame something cleanly, the same way a true virtuoso can captivate a room playing the simplest little sonata and the most demanding concerto alike.
The craft is not in making something sound hard. The craft is in making it land. You do not win the experts by being dense. You win them by being clear. And you do not lose the beginners by showing real depth. You lose them when you forget what it felt like not to know the thing yet.
The room is always more mixed than you think. Some people are brand new. Some people are advanced. Some people are embarrassed that they are not as advanced as they think they should be. Some people know a lot but have weird gaps.
Clarity plays to all of them at once.
Numbers aren’t everything, and I mean that
Here is the honest closer. Yes, half a million learners. And I still hustle to make sales and land clients.
Nothing about this is “set.” There is no magic threshold where the work suddenly gets easy and the money just shows up. There is no follower count, learner count, badge, book, course, or conference stage where you get to stop figuring it out.
I am still out here grinding like everyone else, which is exactly why I wanted to write this. If you are reading along and you are about to teach your first class, or you are a few cohorts in and wondering when it finally clicks, we are in the same game.
I am still hustling. You are still hustling. And honestly, that is the part I probably like most about it.
The big number on my profile does not put me on a different team than you. We are all on the same one.
So here is to the next half million, and to everybody just getting started. Glad you are here. Let’s keep going.