The Art of Making Sh!t Up

Chapter 19Nobody Knows Anything

Nobody knows anything. The longer my career continues, the more I am certain of this. People think they know shit. They have ideas about things. They have thoughts and theories, hypotheses, and past studies. Yet the more things I do and the longer I do them, I have come to discover that most everybody is making shit up on the fly. And that is a good thing.

The whole point of innovation is to create something new. If we are going to create something new, then we can never be certain how it is going to work out. At some point we have to take a chance and make decisions based on the information we have at hand, our past experiences, and our gut intuition. Sprinkle in some wishful thinking and luck and we just may come up with something that nobody else has.

Much like when you figure out that “nobody gives a shit” about you, realizing that by and large nobody knows anything is quite empowering. What can be incredibly intimidating is the idea that everybody else knows much more than you do about whatever it is you want to attempt.

Clearly there are experts in every field and people who've accomplished great things and have far more experience then we will ever have at the start of something. It can cause us to have immense self‐doubt in our own ability and lead us to quit before we ever even get started. I mean, everything has already been done by everyone everywhere, so what's the point? Might as well stick to the same old same old, and wait for that ...