You are an imposter and a fraud, and you’re just pretending you know what you’re doing. There, now that we have that out the way, we can move on; welcome to the club.
I’ve met a lot of experts in my career, and I can tell you something I’ve noticed. The really good ones that really know what they’re doing… they’re completely lost like me and you. It’s the ones that are arrogant enough to actually believe they know everything that you have to worry about. Those are the true imposters.
If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
–W.C. Fields
As someone who has been called an expert many times, I can assure you experts don’t exist. We are all pretending we know what we are doing and we are all making it up as we go. At this point, the world is changing so fast that as soon as you think you have a handle on something, the world has already moved on and you’re a decade behind. So, stop worrying about labels and about being good-enough, and just do the work.
This story is part of an ongoing series diving into the origins of each of rules outlined in Octavo (My eight-fold principles of life and work). Click here to see the full set of rules and to download and print your own copy of the rules and Zine.
Octavo (8vo) is both a format and a philosophy; it is a sheet of paper folded into 8 equal sections to form a book, and it is a philosophy folded into eight principles to form the architecture of how we work and live. Keep these principles posted wherever your work is done and refer to them often. Keep the zine in your back pocket at all times and refer to it when tempted to stray. Both the principles and the zine are provided here for free and can be printed from any monochrome printer that accepts legal-sized paper. Distribute as you see fit to your friends, family, and colleagues (but do not modify).