WTF, Charity?

There is a reaction I get from people often enough that I've started thinking of it as the “WTF, Charity?” phenomenon.

Usually, people are considerably more polite about it.

“You've done a lot.”

“How do you do so many different things?” “Do you sleep?” “WHEN do you sleep?”

“How have you had time to do all of this?”

Sometimes they're looking at my writing career. Sometimes my business experience. Sometimes the consulting work, legal work, advocacy, speaking, systems I've built, projects I've launched, or some strange combination of all of them.

And for years, I haven't had a particularly satisfying answer.

I don't know.

I just... did it.

That sounds ridiculous even to me, but it's true. I never sat down at 25 and created a master plan for accumulating an absurdly eclectic collection of skills and experiences.

Something interested me, so I followed it.

Something was broken, so I tried to understand why.

Someone needed something I didn't know how to do, so I learned.

I had a question, so I went looking for an answer.

And then I did it again.

And again.

And apparently I've been doing that for most of my life, more than twenty years.

Lately, I've even started looking backward and having my own occasional WTF, Charity? moment.

Because viewed all at once, it is a lot.

But I didn't experience it all at once.

I experienced it one problem, one question, one opportunity, one ridiculous idea at a time.

The 45-minute proposal

This morning gave me a clue about what has actually been happening all these years.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with someone about a problem in his business.

I went to bed.

This morning, I woke up with an idea.

What if we approached the problem this way?

So I sat down and started building.

About 45 minutes later, I had a complete 30-day fractional engagement: the problem, the hypothesis, the scope, the methodology, the deliverables, the pricing, the agreement, and a proposal system capable of accepting the engagement and handling payment.

Forty-five minutes.

Except that's not true.

It took me 45 minutes and twenty years.

That distinction matters.

I could build it that quickly because I wasn't starting from zero.

I was drawing from every business I've worked with. Every process I've built. Every system I've watched fail. Every customer I've listened to. Every employee I've managed. Every strange problem someone has dropped in my lap and asked me to figure it out.

And every time I learned something, it became available for the next problem.

Knowledge compounds. So does experience.

Eventually, knowledge becomes pattern recognition

The first time you encounter a problem, you have to figure everything out.

After the tenth time, something looks familiar.

After the hundredth, you start seeing patterns.

Eventually, someone can describe something complicated and your brain starts connecting pieces before you're consciously aware you're doing it.

That can look almost effortless from the outside.

Sometimes it even feels effortless from the inside.

And I think that's where we make a mistake.

We assume that because something has become easy for us, it must be easy.

It isn't.

We just forgot how much work went into making it easy.

A writer can look at a paragraph and know immediately why it isn't working. An experienced attorney can see the issue buried inside hundreds of pages. A mechanic can hear something in an engine that the rest of us don't even notice. And I can walk into an organizational mess, start asking questions, and see connections other people haven't seen yet.

Not because there's magic involved.

Because I've spent twenty years collecting patterns and solving problems.

So how have I done so much?

I'm starting to think I finally have an answer.

I didn't.

Not in the way people imagine when they look at the whole thing.

I did one thing.

Then I did another thing.

I followed problems. I followed people. I followed questions.

I followed whatever made me curious enough to want to understand it.

And every new thing became connected to everything that came before it.

Twenty years later, those connections have become a body of knowledge I couldn't possibly have planned from the beginning. No curriculum could have anticipated which questions I'd follow, which problems I'd encounter, or which seemingly unrelated lessons I'd eventually discover belonged together.

Maybe that's the real answer to the “WTF, Charity?” phenomenon.

There wasn't some master plan.

There was curiosity.

There was a willingness to try things I didn't already know how to do.

There was a tendency to ask why long after everyone else was satisfied with that's just how it works.

There were twenty years of one-thing-after-another.

And apparently, along the way, it compounded.

It still does. Every day.

So the next time someone looks at everything I've done and asks:

“How the hell have you done so much?”

I think I finally know what I'll tell them.

Twenty years. One thing at a time.

Although “WTF, Charity?” is still perfectly acceptable. 😂