About 11 minutes into every first call, someone brilliant says the same six words to me.
“But everyone knows that.”
200 and something authors now. Founders, surgeons, hoteliers, a woman who rebuilt a company from her kitchen table, a man who has forgotten more about supply chains than I will ever learn. Same six words. Every one of them wrong.
Not “mostly wrong.” Wrong. A hundred percent, 200 for two, I have never once heard those words and thought yes, fair enough, everyone does know that.
Congratulations, you’re too good at your job
Here’s the mechanism, and it’s genuinely annoying.
When you learn something it starts out effortful. You think about it, you get it wrong, you look it up. Somewhere around the ten-thousandth repetition it stops being a thing you do and becomes a thing you are. It goes underground. It runs without you.
That’s mastery. It’s glorious. It also comes with a nasty little side effect, which is that you lose the ability to see it as information at all. It stops feeling like knowledge and starts feeling like weather. Just the conditions everyone’s operating in.
So when you go hunting for something to write about, your brain sails straight past the good stuff. You’re scanning for things that feel hard, because hard feels valuable. The hard things are the ones you learned recently, which makes them the ones you’re worst at. The easy things, the ones you’d be embarrassed to write down, are the 20 years.
Being excellent at something makes you a terrible judge of what’s worth saying about it. There is no version of this where getting better fixes the problem. It gets worse. Every year you improve, you get slightly more useless at seeing your own value.
What it’s actually costing you, in money
This isn’t a charming psychological quirk. It has a bill attached and you have been paying it for years.
Watch what happens on your next sales call. You’ll spend 40 minutes casually solving someone’s real problem, because it’s easy and you enjoy it and it doesn’t feel like work. Then you’ll quote on the deliverable. The slides. The report. The thing a competent junior could produce.
You have just inverted your own pricing, given away the expensive part for free, charged for the cheap part, and done it cheerfully. Every single week. That is a genuinely mad way to run a business and nobody has ever pointed it out to you.
Then there’s the boring book. You’ve discounted everything automatic, so what’s left is whatever you picked up last year off a podcast. Out comes a perfectly competent book about the thing eleven other people are also writing about. It dies quietly and you decide you’re not a writer, which is bullshit, but it’s a very comfortable kind of bullshit so it sticks.
Then the one that actually gets me. You don’t publish, don’t speak, don’t post, and it isn’t fear. It’s a sincere belief that you have nothing to add. Meanwhile the room is being led by someone who knows a third of what you know and carries none of the doubt. You’ve met them. They’re on a stage right now saying something you’d have footnoted.
Four places to look, since thinking harder won’t work
Asking yourself what you know that others don’t is precisely the question your brain is broken for. You need evidence from outside your own head.
What people ask you twice. Not the polite one-off. The question that keeps coming back from different people in different rooms over years. Three unconnected humans asking you the same thing isn’t a coincidence. That’s a market, and it has been waving at you.
What makes you impatient. My favourite, and it is almost never wrong. Notice where your jaw tightens. The thing your industry keeps getting wrong that you gave up correcting somewhere around 2019. The advice that circulates that you know to be total chaotic nonsense. Irritation is expertise with nowhere to go.
What takes you 5 minutes and everyone else 5 days. Reading a P&L. Diagnosing a room. Rewriting a paragraph so it stops apologising. You do it on autopilot and assume it’s basic. It is the opposite of basic, which is why they keep asking you to do it.
What you’d never put in a proposal because it sounds unprofessional. The rule of thumb. The tell you look for. The thing you actually decide on before the analysis catches up. That’s the good stuff. That’s the whole book.
One warning, because I’ve watched people ruin it
You’ll find the thing. Then you’ll get nervous, because it will look too simple written down, and you’ll dress it up. Add a framework. Give it an acronym. Put it in a two-by-two.
Don’t. The value was that you could say it plainly and be right. The second you tart it up, it joins nine thousand other books with a two-by-two in them, and the one thing that made it yours is gone.
Say it flat. Say it in the words you’d use in the car park afterwards. That’s the version people repeat, and being repeated is the entire game.
Everyone does not know that. They have never known that. They have been getting it wrong for years while you sat there assuming it was obvious, and honestly, that’s a bit of a shame for everyone involved.
Your Next Fave Read
- Is My Story Worth a Book? How to Know Before You Write One
- How to Turn Your Business Into a Book Without It Reading Like a Case Study
- The Storykeeper Manifesto: Why Your Most Powerful Business Asset Hasn’t Been Written Yet
Ready to get your wisdom into the world, however you write it? Book a free validation call. We’ll figure out the right approach for your specific book and your actual goals, whether that’s coaching, ghostwriting, or the two of us writing it together. writewordmagic.com
