Listen to David Bowie: To succeed, you need to get out of your depth

I have a far less poetic rule: Make It Up As You Go Along. And the older we get, the greater our ability of pulling it off. Here's a manifesto for the MIU Generation...

There’s a brilliant comedy sketch (embedded below), in which Alexander Armstrong boasts to fellow plane passenger Ben Miller about his busy job criss-crossing the world for important meetings. ‘What do you do?’ Miller asks, to which an exasperated Armstrong raises his hands and replies: ‘I don’t know, I have literally no idea.’

Neither do I. And yet this this week, at an age when I’m meant to be slowing down, I landed the biggest contract of my career – my new career, not the old one - without really having a clue what I’m doing.

I blame David Bowie who said something that has always stuck with me. He was talking about creativity but it’s advice that everyone should follow:

‘If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.’

I have a far less poetic rule but it touches on the same principle: do not be afraid to Make It Up As You Go Along.

Because for the past 12 years I have gradually built a company fuelled by the one thing that every successful entrepreneur, executive and business manual insists that you absolutely must not do.

Put in place a plan, they say. Set specific goals. Define your purpose. Build a sustainable strategy. Benchmark performance against the metrics.

Perhaps I would have made an even greater success of my entrepreneurial life, my second career, if I’d followed the accepted wisdom. But, instead, I set myself an entirely different goal when, at the age of 43, I got made redundant, turned my back on the profession I loved and sat in the kitchen with my head in my hands wondering if I really could reinvent my life, find a gap in the market and become my own boss.

More middle-aged people are doing the same thing. Apparently, a third of 45-55 year-olds want to change their career ‘before it’s too late’. Whenever I speak to people thinking of making that change, they always ask me the same thing: ‘But how do I do it?’ As if I knew. Actually I do.

Wing it. Because when you hit middle age, you’ve earned the right to be MIU.

When, a few days ago, that global titan asked me to help them, it was because they were impressed with my unconventional approach (if you can even call it an approach). Except they didn’t say ‘making it up’. Instead, they spoke of all the things that workplace AI tools will gradually drum out of us - spontaneity, nimbleness, agility of mind, thinking on your feet, questioning instead of knowing, the courage to make mistakes and the confidence to correct them at speed. Essentially, I’ll be training, coaching and mentoring their teams in making it up as you go along.

You might say I have the perfect grounding in MIU. First, I was a journalist for more than two decades, a career in which making it up as you go along is a requisite skill. Second, I’m a dad twice over with children who still think I have the answer to life’s imponderables.

Now my new career as an entrepreneur has shown me that success is dependent on not being afraid of making it up as you go along, tripping up and getting up.

When I was turfed out of my job in 2011, I decided to find a new career at the ridiculously mature age of 42. ‘The biggest mistake you can possibly make,’ warned my friend and former colleague. ‘You’re too old for that, mate.’ In the years since, as I’ve built a corporate training business from nothing to one that brings in a far healthier six-figure income than I would have ever enjoyed if I had remained in the media, I’ve made countless mistakes because I’m happy to make it up as I go along.

And it’s only now that I realise my naivety, foolishness, shortsightedness, kamikaze-like bravery and avoidance of reality have worked in my favour.

You can follow all that slick business-book advice if you want. Plan every minute detail. Be strategic. I’m sure it works. But you won’t have the rare joy of knowing you achieved success later in life despite not having a clue what you are doing. Because if Donald Trump can do it, so can I…

Do not dye your hair, Botox your brow or pretend to be younger than you are

It’s better to be 50 than 40. Age is your secret weapon because everyone from Generations X to Alpha wants what you have. The experience of life at the sharp end. They want to see your battle scars. They don’t want you to have their skills, they want yours. The old school stuff that, in an era of tiny attention spans, actually works.

Just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean that you should

Your experience is more valuable in a totally different environment. If you just keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re never going to grow or maximise your abilities. Central to an MIU ‘strategy’ is that you position yourself in a job that you know nothing about and bring to it the skills that that industry desperately needs. You are there to improve something not just maintain a status quo.

The more mistakes you make, the better things will turn out

Einstein said compound interest – or making incremental changes so as to iron out the flaws - was ‘the eighth wonder of the world’. Look what everyone else is doing, copy it and then do what you can to make it better, preparing yourself to make wrong-turns and correct your errors. Business gurus call this rapid iteration. I think of it as gradually changing your mind without letting anyone know you’re panicking.

Losing control is good for you

Making it up means being comfortable without having control. I spent most of my 40s worrying about that lack of control over life, finances, career. Aside from family, there was precious little to hold on to. It made me realise that everyone’s relative stability was also hanging by a thread, masked by a smart suit and fancy title. Whilst I grew stronger by embracing my fears – because that’s all I could do – I felt they were hiding from theirs. I’m never certain what I’m doing but, because I’m convinced few people are, I’m more likely to trust myself to make it up as I go along.

Learn the art of listening attentively

Whenever you’re in a meeting, don’t have a script. Instead, allow what other people are saying to influence how you respond. Most people in a business setting just nod or smile as the other person speaks, or prepare to push back with their own biases and ideas. By adopting an MIU stance, you have to suggest something based on what you’ve just heard. Your next move is wholly dependent on what is being said to you in that moment. Everyone talks about co-creation like it’s a game of tennis, back and forth. But it’s more like being given a serious diagnosis by a medic: your response is even more important than what is being said to you.

Massively over-prepare – but about them, not you

Winging it takes a lot of energy. Because you are literally flying by the seat of your pants, it means your brain is firing on all cylinders. There is no complacency. It is more exhausting not knowing what you are doing than if you do because you’re having to respond faster when things move in an unexpected direction. You can only do that if you know as much as possible about the people you’re dealing with, their backgrounds and goals, the internal politics. To make it up as you go along, you need to do your homework on them.

Never say I don’t understand. Just nod and then use ChatGPT

I still don’t understand what a ‘paradigm shift’ is, and why on earth would anyone want to boil an ocean? Corporate-speak is peppered with words, acronyms, titles and phrases that are designed to intimidate you. I think it’s why large language models (LLMs) were invented. So that when you’re nodding on a zoom call, you can quickly find out what all of this bulls*** means on your smartphone. Equally, if someone asks you if you can do something that you’ve never done before, say ‘Yes’ and then get a book on Amazon that covers the basics. Everything is basically common sense. Except maybe brain surgery.

You are a nobody. Be proud of it

When you have status, you can’t be seen to be MIU. You are ‘important’. As soon as you start working for yourself, all those titles, the accoutrements of success…they mean nothing. You are a nobody and that’s liberating. It means that you will have to do what everyone tells you not to – give stuff away. Freebies are your calling card. Be honest, everyone is stealing from everyone else. Let them. Give stuff away and stop being so protective about your IP. You’re a nobody.

Wear as many hats as you can and then throw all of them away except two

At the beginning of your MIU journey, you will say that there are loads of things you can do. And you probably can. But you need to whittle this down to two. Preferably, two really niche things. One that you know you can do, the ‘banker’, and the other that you think you can do but aren’t quite sure if there’s a market for it because no one else seems to be doing it. This second one will become your career but it might take a while to find it.

Whatever you think you should charge is probably 50% too low

This is the most difficult – and important – tactic to master. I’ve not yet got it right. This goes hand in hand with the need to focus on short-term gains. I saw this in a management book: ‘Short term wins offer little beyond dopamine hits and the stroking of egos.’ Er, yes, and your point being? I need dopamine. I need my ego to be stroked. I need this month’s income to be better than last. The text went on: ‘Incremental achievements are not the true goal. They are the means to an end.’ Rubbish. If you are in MIU mode then small wins will eventually turn into bigger ones.

Personal chemistry is better than any website with bells and whistles

You’ve got to be in the same room as people. It’s how you can sell yourself and unleash the most powerful weapon in your arsenal. Honesty. No one else is brutally honest with each other because they’re trying to protect the strange, passive equilibrium of corporate life. Even though people have been doing it the same way (or, worse, wrong) for decades, no one has had the courage to say so. Except those of us MIU because you’ve got nothing to lose.

PS - Why are you reading this?

You’re meant to be making it up as YOU go along, not listening to what other people tell you to do.