One of the big problems with society as it has been set up to this point it that it makes supplicants of us. When it comes to getting ahead and building a career that leads to personal freedom, we feel like we have to ask permission for everything.
Why is this?
It’s because in the past the distribution channels were all owned by big companies. So for example, there were a few publishing companies, a few movie studios, a few record labels, a few TV channels . . . and that was it.
If you wanted to get your voice heard, you had to go through a long and arduous process of impressing people first.
Let’s say you wanted to publish a book. The first thing you would do would be to get an agent. Although agents are meant to help you sell your book to a publisher, the task of getting on a decent agent’s radar became fiendishly difficult. Agents were—and are—bombarded with thousands of manuscripts a month from hopeful authors.
The vast majority of them get rejected.
But even if you managed to secure the services of an agent, the next phase was—if anything—more challenging. For now you would be asked to make multiple ‘tweaks’ to your book before your agent took it out to publishers. You might spend many months retooling your writing before it was even seen by a decision-maker at a publishing house.
Once the agent was happy with the manuscript, he or she would start shopping it around to the big houses. But success was (is) by no means certain. A great many books would still get turned down, even though they’d come through well-respected agents.
All of this was incredibly frustrating and emotionally-draining for the writer as you can imagine. Even worse, it was time-consuming as well.
These days, though, self-publishing via Amazon and other platforms has become easy and efficient. Crucially, it also pays better, with writers being able to keep up to 70% of the revenue earned through sales as opposed to something like 10% through a traditional publishing deal. And significantly, the stigma that was once attached to self-publishing has now disappeared. These days, being an ‘indie author’ is cool.
So why are more people rushing to publish their books? For a number of reasons, of course—but a big one is that we have been conditioned to wait until we have ‘permission’ before putting ourselves forward.
Permission
It’s almost as though we want some divine being to appear in the sky, point down at us with a huge finger and say ‘Yes, YOU Troy—I hereby give YOU permission to to write and publish a book’.
This is ridiculous. Not only is it not going to happen (of course) but also, we all need to learn that in this economy—and in this world—the only person we need to seek permission of is ourselves.
This can be tricky. Commonly, people are reticent because are concerned about what is called ‘imposter syndrome’. They fear that they don’t know enough about their topic, or that they won’t be taken seriously by others.
This is normal and it’s unsurprising. But it is also an impediment to progress and growth, and you must eradicate it with extreme prejudice.
Of course, I’m not suggesting you should write a book (or create a video series, or whatever) about brain surgery if you aren’t a brain surgeon.
That would be irresponsible, to say the least.
But say you want to write about relationships. A lot of people bill themselves as ‘relationship experts’. But how does that work? Who are these people, and how do you really define an expert in such a field anyway?
If you want to write a book about relationships then you have as much right to as anyone else. If you have only ever been in one relationship then that’s great—you have experience of that relationship. And if you’ve been in none then you can write about your experience of not having had one. Or about your observations of other peoples’ relationships as a single person.
Each of us has a unique viewpoint and each of us has a unique voice. And your contribution is just as valid as mine or anyone else’s—whether they call themselves an expert or not.
As James Altucher says, we need to choose ourselves. No one else is going to do it for us. After all, that celestial being in the sky isn’t going to come forward any time soon and tell you to step up to that plate.
No—the responsibility for starting is all on you.
But believe me, the rewards are great.
By the way, if you want to read more about not asking others for permission do pick up a copy of my book How To Be An Assh*le—it’s packed full of tips and techniques for standing out from the crowd and doing your own thing.
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