Everyone Is Making It Up As They Go (Really)

It's not just you.

Aug 05, 2024

I’m back! It turns out that readers liked the archive series more than I expected, so I’ll plan to do more of it later this year. For now, here are the posts we published while I was in book edit mode:

Last week I attended a private gathering of bestselling authors. At least by standards of material success, almost all of them were much more accomplished than me. They’d sold more books, built smarter and better businesses, had more online followers, and so on.

Here you might expect I’d say something like “Good news, though: they were all secretly miserable.” 😆

But no! Not at all. Most of them were type-A and driven, sure, but they also tended to be somewhat balanced in terms of family life and hobbies.

I’ve been going to this event annually for the past four years, and every time I leave I feel simultaneously inspired and depressed.

When I talked about it afterwards with family and close friends, I focused on my sense of inferiority. “It’s amazing how well so-and-so has done!” I’d say, over and over. And then I’d be sad that I hadn’t been able to do something similar.

(One of my friends even said to me before I went this year: “It sounds like you don’t enjoy this thing very much. Why do you keep going?” Which was a fair question! But I was probably just complaining too much, because I do enjoy it, in addition to feeling miserable later.)

Anyway, this year’s event was inspiring as always, and I even left feeling less depressed than usual (so there’s hope, I guess?). But what I wanted to highlight was several private conversations I had with some of these Very Famous Authors. In individual and small group conversations, I told the story of how I felt intimidated by some of them, thinking it was a funny, self-deprecating anecdote.

Their responses greatly surprised me. Every single one of them said, “Me too!!!”

So it wasn’t just me, in other words. We were all intimidated, or at least many of us were. I thought I was the person who was least qualified to be there, yet several others felt exactly the same way.

Further, the more we talked details, the less strategic some of their careers seemed to be. They were all very smart, to be clear. They were all extremely hard-working. But for many of them/us, what their success came down to was that they found something that worked well, and then they doubled down.

In other words: they were making it up as they went along, just like I was.

There’s probably some leadership book about how this is what successful people do—they try different things, they see what works, they do more of it etc.—but I’m less interested in the “follow this formula” message. To me, the part about making it up as you go along is more interesting.

It reminded me a little of my days hosting the World Domination Summit, a big annual event in Portland, Oregon. I recruited popular speakers and introduced them before their talks. I watched from the sidelines as they delivered powerful, heartfelt messages.

And since I saw them right before and right after they went on stage, I could see something that others couldn’t: the fact that most of them were winging it in one way or another.

They too were worried, they too were anxious before their talk, they too confided in me about something that wasn’t going well in their business and life—even as it appeared to everyone else that their world was beyond perfect.

So maybe it’s helpful to clarify this point more widely. No one has it all together; everyone is making it up as they go.

In the next post, I’ll share more of my story on how I’ve done that over the years. Stay tuned, and let me know if you identify with any of it. 😊