Be an idiot in motion, not a genius at rest
My ex-girlfriend used to call me the “stupidest smart person she ever met.” At the time I found it funny. Slightly insulting. But in hindsight, true.
I used to read about a hundred books a year. That’s not an exaggeration (I had a list). Psycho-Cybernetics. The War of Art. Purple Cow. The Lean Startup. The Untethered Soul. Antifragile. The Denial of Death. And even outdated pick up books like The Game. Turns out all that reading was, in part, a well-informed way of being behind in life.
I was “concept aware” but still made poor decisions. $100K of racked up credit card debt. Barely making enough money to live. Because I hadn’t internalized this one idea that may flip your paradigm upside down.
“An idiot in motion goes further than a genius at rest”
... I wasn’t a genius. But I was an armchair intellectual at rest.
And if you’re the type of person who’s interested in everything from consciousness to storytelling, you’ve probably lived this too. You think big. You read widely. You collect interests like Pokemon cards. Identify as a jack-of-all-trades. And somehow you still end most days having done nothing with any of it.
The antidote isn’t feeding the genius with more info. It’s allowing yourself to look like an idiot.
Before making a single dollar writing on the internet, I was a checked out college teacher. My now co-founder, Dale, was an uninspired forklift operator. Neither of us had a degree in anything remotely related to business or writing. We just decided one day to become ghostwriters, and took one idiotic step at a time.
We didn’t know how to write online. So we wrote until we did.
We didn’t know how to get clients. So we tried until we did.
We didn’t know much about our clients’ industries. So we interviewed them until we did.
3 months in we had decent writing but 0 clients. 6 months in we had 4 clients on $2,000-5,000 retainers. 7 months in we landed a $10,000 per month deal. 12 months in we quit our 9-5s and flew to Latin America. 18 months in we launched our first writing & personal branding cohort, and made $140,000 in 4 days.
All because we just tried shit before we felt ready.
I looked for this pattern in a few of my personal heroes, and saw it in all of them:
Christopher Nolan is a creative genius, but only because he was an idiot in motion first.
Rejected from film school and broke, he didn’t wait for permission. He studied English literature just so he could use the campus club’s free 16mm cameras. He cast his friends as the actors and shot his first movie, Following, only on Saturdays because everyone worked weekdays. They couldn’t afford location permits, so they shot in his mom’s living room.
That scrappy $6,000 film earned him $4.5 million to shoot Memento.
Mark Manson did the same thing in publishing. No literary agent, no publishing deal, and no grand plan to become a global bestselling author. He was a broke, unemployed guy blogging about dating advice from his apartment under a fake name.
Most articles got ignored, but he kept hitting publish anyway. That messy, unpolished output is how he stumbled into his voice, built a massive blog, and eventually wrote mega bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck.
Meanwhile, the pseudo-genius archetype disappears to write a magnum opus no one ever sees. They watch six months of Hormozi videos instead of starting an actual business. Or spend two years tweaking an album that will never be “ready.”
The idiot in motion understands that the only way to succeed is to get out of their head and into reality. They take the one step right in front of them. Even if it’s messy.
Talk to the stranger. Publish the writing. Start the business. Post the video. Do something!
You get a positive result? Great. Do that again. You get a bad one? Great. You know what not to do next time. Run this cycle enough times, and things start to go your way. Your taste develops. Your intuition calibrates. You run into luck simply because you’re making too many moves to miss it.
I spoke at the Future Proof Creator Conference a few months back. Someone from the audience asked me:
“What’s something you’re most proud of?”
My answer, “I actually tried.”
Take that first, idiotic step.
-Taylin & Dale
P.S. If you’re the type of person who’s got 99 interests and you don’t know what direction to pick, this article might help:
And if you’re a chronic over-thinker and “just take action” advice doesn’t work for you, I’ve got you covered:
