Fake It 'Till You Make It
Nobody knows what they are doing.
When I was eight years old, I gave up skateboarding. I tried standing on the board a few times, but I just couldn’t crack it. I decided that I would never be as good as the kids I saw on TV; it felt as if I was late to the game. I failed and accepted that failure as an inevitability.
20 years later, I have made a career out of taking on challenges where success depends in our ability to learn new skills and solve complex problems. Over our short life as an agency, we’ve found ourselves pitching against large advertising groups with project teams larger than our entire company. It can be an intimidating atmosphere but I’m reminded that despite our size, we have been invited to pitch. We have earned a place here.
So how did we get here?
Failure is the Foundation for Success
Here’s the thing about experience — nobody is born with it. I started my career at LSU Student Media, a place that had the same teaching method as John Wayne.
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It was terrifying. I failed a lot, but I am thankful every day that I was able to learn that way. Being thrown into an uncomfortable situation forces you to truly determine if you are going to flee from a challenge or fight for your success. As a commission-only salesperson, I went to a minimum of ten meetings every week and got shot down every day while being a full-time student. I spent the first three months of my career thinking I wasn’t good enough (and being told so by my leads each time a sale didn’t close) and wanted to quit every day. Thankfully, our professional advisor and student leadership kept coaching me into learning from my mistakes.
As frustrated as I was, I was even more pissed off about losing every day. I felt like a pretender in a world that I would never be able to join, but I was determined to prove to everyone that I did belong. This fueled me to fake confidence, because even if I had no idea what I was doing I knew that I wasn’t going to give up.
After three months of failures, I closed my first sale. It was for a computer store that placed a week of ads on KLSU for a grand total of $36. I cried of happiness on my way home.
Experience is Earned
I’ve come a long way since those first months in the basement of Hodges Hall. Today, our team helps some of the world’s biggest brands create awesome experiences and I’m thankful for the opportunity to do this. Despite this, I learn more about my industry, about myself, and about my own shortcomings every day. I can confidently say that more often than not, I have no idea what I’m doing.
This is fine. As a matter of fact, this is ideal — if there’s a benefit to being able to speak with leaders in my industry, it is that even the biggest agencies and brands out there are constantly evolving in their knowledge. Experience doesn’t lessen the challenges ahead of you, it propels you to take on bigger targets you must miss before hitting. Failure is critical for growth.
This is important so I’ll repeat it — you don’t know shit, and the sooner you admit this the quicker you will achieve greatness. Thinking you’ve got it all figured out is the real danger. Don’t mistake this for confidence; it’s complacency. We all experience it but luckily life has a way to kick you square in the face to snap you out of it.
Confidence > Everything
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Nothing builds character like being knocked down to the ground only to get back up with a smile on your face, asking for more. It’s not because you love failing, or even because you love the task. You have to smile because if other people sense that you are afraid, they will not trust you. Leadership is about remaining calm in the face of doom and trusting that your experience will be able to pull you out of this. You must place 100% of your trust in yourself.
My source of confidence is knowing that failure is always short-term if you are willing to try again. I first gained confidence through my stubbornness and knowledge that I wouldn’t let anyone tell me I wasn’t good enough, even if they were right. It’s the knowledge that the only true thing in life, the only lasting thing, is the process of gaining knowledge and experience through failure. I know that my team will succeed because we all trust in our ability to learn.
This is how we head into large opportunities full of confidence — we trust in our individual ability to overcome failure and our collective ability to problem-solve our way out of any situation. It’s scary, but some people would kill for the opportunity to fail this big.
Embrace the failure. Once you embrace finding rock bottom, you’ll find that true rock bottom is way deeper than you ever thought. Accept the fact that success doesn’t last long before you fail again but that’s okay. You’re going to die, but as long as you are alive you’ve got a shot at success. Even if you have to fake it until you make it.
Get back on that skateboard, it’s not too late.