Nobody is coming to save you.

In the summer of 2010, my boss called me into his office and told me to prepare to move to San Francisco in two weeks. A place I had never even visited.

"I need you to fire the sales team out there," he said. "They aren't getting it done. All five people. Then I need you to hire five new people, train them, and get them up to speed as fast as possible."

Not only had I never been to San Francisco. I'd also never fired, hired, or trained anyone in my life. I was just finding success for the first time in my career as a salesperson. And things were changing fast.

I remember stammering out a question like, "Is there…a playbook we use? Or someone I could shadow to learn how this all works?"

He looked at me like I'd asked the dumbest questions he'd ever heard.

"You're smart. Figure it out."

And that was the end of the conversation.

I left his office with a mix of fear and adrenaline that I still remember. And right then, I knew.

Nobody was coming to save me.

There was no expert at the company I could learn from, ready to swoop in and tell me what to do. There was no manual to read or framework to follow. Just me, a fast-approaching deadline, and five people whose lives I was about to mess up.

When panic forces you to learn

I spent the next 24 hours in a full panic, wondering how the hell I would do any of this.

Then I just decided I'd better start learning as fast as humanly possible.

How do you fire someone?

I Googled it. Watched a few interviews and bought a book that I read in four hours. Then I called a friend who'd fired people before and asked specific questions about the parts I was especially worried about.

Then I jumped on a flight across the country, moved into a new apartment, and fired five salespeople the following week. It felt absolutely terrible, but I did it.

How do you hire someone?

Same process. More books, more videos, and more online forums. I hired five people in three weeks, set up their start dates together, and hoped to God I wouldn't screw it all up.

Now, how do you train a sales team?

I was good at sales, but doing and teaching are two different animals. So I read books about sales training, rented hotel conference rooms, found services that delivered whiteboards and projectors, and I built a training curriculum from scratch based on what I thought might actually work.

And this was 2010. Before AI could help with any of this, and before YouTube was the massive repository of free education that it is today. But even then, the information was out there if I was willing to go search for it.

A year later, it had all gone well enough that the company asked me to do that all over again, this time in Boston. And then in Los Angeles. Eventually, I was chosen to teach my process at our company headquarters in New York.

Every time I moved across the country to set up a new market, I had to figure out stuff I'd never done before. And each time, I proved the same thing to myself:

I can just figure shit out. I started to know that about myself.

That realization changed everything

To realize I'm the kind of person who figures things out changed everything for me. It became the foundation for how I would do things in life and in business from then on.

Before this epiphany, I spent my twenties waiting for someone to tell me what to do. I begged my boss, my manager, the senior people for guidance. I waited for playbooks, trainings, and permission to move forward.

Looking back, I was a totally helpless employee. The kind I'd hate to manage. A sponge waiting to absorb information, but without the first inclination toward action. No clue how to find information on my own and get on with the work. And that's why I got fired from so many jobs by the time I was 28.

I was waiting to be taught instead of teaching myself.

But when I realized nobody would help me with the San Francisco project, action became the only option. And the more I taught myself, the more I realized what I was capable of, without needing anyone else's guidance or approval.

The $160 lightbulb

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, here in Upstate New York.

The special lightbulb in our water filtration system died, and it needed to be replaced. Frankly, home maintenance and vendor management is more Jennifer's department, and I'm fairly useless when it comes to stuff like this. But she moaned about the shocking cost of paying a plumber to replace the lightbulb, and I got to thinking I could figure it out myself.

So I took pictures of the system from different angles. The label on the filter, the model number, and the way the bulb connected to the wall. I uploaded my pictures to Gemini and asked what kind of bulb I needed to buy and how to replace it.

It came back with the exact model number, a link to buy it, and a warning that the old bulb might get stuck in the sleeve. Sure enough, when I pulled it out, it stuck. But Gemini had warned me, and I knew to twist gently instead of yanking it out. Voila!

Then I watched a YouTube video of someone replacing the same bulb. Thirty minutes later, the new bulb was in, our system was back up and running, and I was proud of myself for figuring out something unrelated to my online business.

The whole thing cost me $160 for the bulb and half an hour of my time. A service call would've been $400, plus waiting around for someone to show up.

Now, to be fair, calling someone may have been the smarter move from a pure time and money perspective. A plumber would've done it in ten minutes instead of thirty, and I could've spent that time working on something that actually makes me money.

But now I know how to do this task. And the next time the bulb dies (it lasts exactly 365 days), I don't have to rely on anyone for help. I don't have to wait for someone to fit me into their schedule. And I don't have to feel helpless about a basic home maintenance task, which is usually the case. Most importantly, I proved to myself that I'm not as incompetent at this stuff as I make out to be. And that's worth something.

Figuring stuff out on your own is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. Every time I force myself to learn something, the next thing that comes along gets a little easier because I'm getting better at the process of teaching myself.

Why we wait for permission

Today, the potential to teach ourselves just about anything is truly astonishing.

If you don't know how to do something, you can figure it out with a wifi connection and a few keystrokes.

But every single day, I see people pleading to the internet for help.

"How do I write an email series?"
"How do I build a landing page?"
"How do I write social media content?"
"I don't know where to start! HELP ME!"

And it's obvious that they haven't tried anything yet. Because people who have tried have more specific questions. These folks are just hoping someone will swoop in with the perfect answers.

But the perfect answers don't exist.

And here's what I've realized: people don't wait because they can't find the answer. They wait because they don't trust themselves to know which answer is the right one.

We've been conditioned to believe that every problem already has a perfect solution and that someone a lot smarter than us has already figured it out. That there's an expert somewhere with the exact framework we need, the right playbook, that one missing piece that will make everything click for us.

And if we just wait long enough, scroll long enough, or consume enough content, eventually someone will tell us exactly what that information is. So we won't have to risk getting it wrong.

But that's not how it works.

Because your situation is too specific for someone else's playbook. The guru doesn't know your business. The framework doesn't account for your constraints. And the expert hasn't lived your life.

So even when you find advice that seems perfect, you still have to adapt it to your situation. You still have to figure out what works for you and what doesn't. You still have to make decisions without knowing for sure if they're right.

Which means you were always going to have to figure it out yourself anyway.

The only difference is whether you start now or waste another six months waiting for permission that's not coming.

What I do now

When my boss told me to figure it out in 2010, I didn't have a choice. I could figure it out, or fail in front of everyone and probably get fired.

And that pressure forced me to stop waiting and start learning and doing.

But it turns out that you don't really need that kind of pressure. You don't need someone to force you into a corner before you're allowed to teach yourself something.

You can just start figuring it out right now.

You can Google. Watch a video. Ask AI, and argue with it until you get something useful. And once you've learned a lot, then call someone who knows more than you and ask specific, nuanced questions. And once you've done that, try something and see what happens. Adjust based on what you learn, and try again. Then you just keep going.

Because no matter what you're trying to learn, the information is out there. The tools are generally free or inexpensive. And you're more capable than you think.

You just have to stop waiting for someone, or something else.

The bottom line

So here's what I'm wondering this week.

What are you waiting for guidance to start doing right now? What is a problem you're sitting on, hoping an expert will eventually solve for you, when you could just start figuring it out yourself?

You can't teach yourself everything. But you can certainly teach yourself a lot more than you think. And the only way to find out what you're actually capable of is to stop waiting around and start doing.

Reply to this email and tell me about it. I can't write back to every email, but I read every response.

That's all for this week.

See you next Saturday.