I keep thinking about this quote.
The universe doesn’t reward potential.
It rewards audacity.
I can’t remember where I first saw this. Probably some social media feed, wedged between that Tom Holland Lip Sync Battle video and an ad for a chicken shredder I already own. But it stuck.
The line always makes me think of Gordy.
One of my best friends on this earth was a guy named Gordy. Smartest dude I ever knew. He was one of those people who could be a little hard to be around after a while, because his brain worked faster than everybody else’s. Keeping up was kinda exhausting.
My favorite Gordy story is from when he moved up to Seattle and was job hunting. He lied on his resume. And he ended up landing a contracting gig that needed someone well versed in MySQL, which Gordy was not. So he spent the weekend before his start date at the library and learned everything he could about MySQL.
Keep in mind, this was the late 90s. Fledgling internet. No smartphones. No AI. Just a library card and nerve.
Monday morning, Gordy showed up, went through onboarding, got the lay of the land, and had relatively little trouble. I think he eventually got fired for nicking the boss’s cigarettes. But he didn’t care. He found the next gig, studied up, and was off and running again.
Gordy never waited to be qualified. He decided he was the guy, and then spent the weekend making it true.
So this week, let’s talk about audacity, what it is, why it matters, and how you can decide who you are before anyone gives you permission.
Nobody Checked
Back in 1928, two sociologists named W.I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas put words to something that seems obvious once you hear it.
When people define a situation as real, it becomes real in its consequences.
They weren’t talking about job hunting. The textbook examples are bank runs and kids who get labeled troublemakers. A perfectly healthy bank fails because enough people decide it’s failing and rush to pull their money out. A kid gets called a problem enough times that he starts acting like one. People don’t react to facts. They react to what they think the facts mean, and that reaction has real effects, whether or not the facts ever did.
I feel confident that the Thomases didn’t have Gordy in mind. Just about every example of this theorem is a story about something going wrong. A bank collapses. A kid gets written off. Gordy is the rare case of it running the other direction.
Nobody at that gig tested him. They read a resume that said MySQL and treated him like the MySQL guy. So the room’s definition of Gordy bought him time. And time was all he needed, because he’d already spent the weekend turning the lie into something close enough to the truth.
The Thomas Theorem works a bit like a thermostat somebody else set. The room is going to be whatever temperature it’s going to be, and most of us just adjust. We put on a sweater. Most of us never even look for the dial. We walk into rooms that have already been defined for us and assume that’s just how the room is.
The Gap
So if whether a belief is true or not doesn’t really matter, and people act based on what they think is true, then perhaps the gap between faking it and BEING it is...audacity?
I like to think about the job posting Gordy answered. Somebody at that company wrote “must be well versed in MySQL,” and I’d bet good money they spent about all of four minutes on it. They weren’t asking for a sworn affidavit. They were describing the problem they wanted to go away. Most of us read a posting like that as a dead end. Gordy read it as an opportunity.
And that my friends might just be the whole shebang. Not talent. Not confidence. Something simpler and a lot harder to do. Gordy just refused to treat somebody else’s four-minute sentence as a fact about him.
And it’s everywhere once you notice it. Every new parent is a parent on day one, with zero experience and a very real baby. A new pastor is the pastor the first Sunday he steps up to the pulpit, whether or not he feels like one yet. Nobody waits for them to get good at it. The role shows up first. The person grows into it.
But we tend to think of it the other way around. Get good, then get the job. Earn it, then claim it. That’s not how the theorem works, and honestly, it’s not how most careers work either. The claim usually comes first. The room reacts to the claim. And the time that buys you is where the becoming happens.
So for the moment forget talent, or luck, or who ya know or what ya know. Instead consider that success rests on whether you’re willing to make the claim before you feel like you’ve earned it, and then go do the work before anyone notices.
Because yeah, thing is...the audacious claim is actually the easy part. Gordy didn’t walk into that office on Monday with nothing but a lie and a smile. He walked in with a weekend at the library behind him.
The Library Card Part
There’s a Friends episode where Joey lands an audition for a Broadway musical. His resume says three years of modern dance with Twyla Tharp and five years with the American Ballet Theatre. Joey cannot dance. The resume is so impressive that the director asks Joey to teach the number to the rest of the room. He gets through about four seconds and finishes with jazz hands.
Joey and Gordy made pretty much the same claim. The difference is what happened between the claim and the room finding out. Joey showed up with the lie. Gordy showed up having put in no small amount of work.
Anybody can make a claim. Plenty of people do, and most of them get found out, because they treated the claim as the finish line. Gordy treated it as the starting gun. He made the claim on Friday and then ran like hell until Monday.
To me, Gordy lying on his resume is the least interesting part of this story. The job posting is already a stretch. The client already assumes you’ve done this before. The room is already giving you the benefit of the doubt. The only question is whether you treat that doubt as a gift or a debt.
Gordy treated it as a debt. He paid it back before anyone sent the bill.
Conclusion
I miss Gordy.
He died in January of 2012, of complications from lung cancer. Stealing cigarettes cost him more than his job.
I miss knowing someone like that. Someone who almost thought the world was a simulation or a game to play. Not to say that he wasn’t a serious person, he was. He was a good husband, good father. Good man. Good friend. And a good reminder of what is possible.
Here’s what I think Gordy figured out. What he somehow just instinctively got. Most of the walls we run into are made of paper. Job requirements, titles, the right way to do things and the right order to do them in. Somebody, somewhere made all of that up, and they were usually making it up as they went along. Gordy didn’t ignore the rules. He just kinda treated them like suggestions from a stranger. Worth hearing out. Not worth letting run your life.
I want to live more like that. Not the cigarette part. The library part. The part where you decide you’re the guy, and then go make yourself the guy before anyone notices the difference. The rules still matter. They just don’t matter as much as we pretend they do, and I’d rather find that out by trying than by waiting around to be told.
Gordy never asked for permission. I’m trying to ask for less of it.
Ever Forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)
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