John Walt

One of the most helpful things my mentor Scott Dohner ever told me was that “nobody knows what they are doing.” He had built multiple successful businesses and claimed he never knew what he was doing. When I first heard this, it was very challenging to accept. Most successful people I had met up to that point acted like they knew exactly what they were doing. Scott took the opposite approach and was very open about what he didn’t know.

What does it require for you to “know what you are doing” in a given area of life? You have to have “been there and done that.” Repetitive tasks are easy to master, but most of life is a series of complex undertakings that are never completely the same. I have never been older than I am right now. I have never raised kids before, and each child is unique. Every business and nonprofit that I work with is different. Once we account for the fact that everything we are a part of is made up of people and no two people are alike, it becomes painfully obvious that almost every situation in life is unique.

Business

Even after years of building the same business in the same industry, Scott never felt he knew what he was doing. Sure, he knew the industry and their products very well, but a $30M business is different from a $20M business. Every step of the way, the business was changing and growing, so he embraced what he didn’t know.

Years ago, I was reading Steve Blank, the godfather of startup growth methodology, and I realized he was saying the same thing Scott had been telling me. He is a Stanford professor who has taught and advised some of the most successful founders in the world, and at the heart of his approach, he is essentially telling people to assume they don’t know what they are doing.

I have often gone into businesses and heard someone on the team say some version of “I know what I am doing because I did XYZ before.” It is always a red flag for me. Now, when I start working with a new client, one of the first things I say is, “None of us know what we are doing.” I have yet to have anyone object once I explain the concept. In fact, it's pretty comforting to most people. We have been raised in a world that tells us, “You better know what you are doing.” That comes out of fear of failure. How can you reassure yourself you won’t fail? Tell yourself you know what you are doing. It doesn’t mean you won't fail, it just means you might feel more confident as you fail and won’t recognize your failing until it's too late.

Now, every business faces a rapidly evolving environment. Solutions that worked a few years ago likely won’t today and it is only speeding up. When a leadership team embraces that they don’t know what they are doing then it frees them to focus on testing their assumptions. When something they thought would work doesn’t then they can quickly respond by adapting their approach and testing a new theory. The biggest breakthroughs in technology and science have come from testing and iteration repeated over and over again. The path to success is paved in failure.

Faith

Most of the religious world has been shaped by disagreements about God’s nature, opinions, and preferred practices. That’s an oversimplified way of explaining why we have so many denominations and corner churches in our country and around the world. Somehow, what we think we know about God divides people.

I think our need to feel like we “know what we are doing” is why we work so hard to define what God is and what He isn’t. We try to put God in a box, probably because we can’t enjoy the mystery of an infinite God inviting us to follow Him on a journey of transformation.

Relationship is so much harder than religion. Following rules and agreeing with dogma is far simpler than dying to ourselves and following Jesus. I often feel like God is leading me in a certain direction, and then I find myself accidentally trying to take it from there. The picture I get is God is talking to me and saying where He wants me to go, and I just hang up and say ok, I have enough information now. I am constantly being kindly reminded as I continue on this journey that how I get there is more important than getting there.

I believe that the reason we need to embrace that we don’t know what we are doing is so that we grow closer to the One who knows everything. It’s another form of letting go of control; it’s part of the practice of dying to the false self.

“Most legalism comes from people thinking they know what they are doing.” - Scott Dohner

Family

In 2024, I asked a lot of people how to raise young men. In fact, if I told someone that I was researching this topic, they would readily offer their hard-won parenting advice whether I asked or not. It was an awesome experience and I learned a few things both from what people said and what they didn’t realize they were saying.

First, parenting is super humbling. I could see that most people I talked to carried joy and regret from their journey of parenthood. Joy from the beautiful love filled memories and regret from the areas they failed. Not surprisingly, it was parents of younger kids who seemed to have more confidence that they knew what they were doing. Parents of fully grown or teenage kids often were very open about the things they wished they did differently and the ways they felt that they let their kids down.

There are so many different opinions about how to parent kids. Last year, the consistent themes I saw were not rules about the “right way to parent” but principles about how to have a relationship with your children and how to pass along wisdom.

I came away convinced that parenting, like all of life, is not about right or wrong. Instead, it is about applying and demonstrating foundational principles through relationships built on trust and connection. Who we are as people and how we live that out in relationships with our kids is what matters most. It’s not about what we know but how we navigate the unknown.

Embracing what we don’t know

Before I met Scott, I believed that successful people knew what they were doing, and that was what made them successful. The truth is that most truly successful people in all areas of life become successful because instead of trying to act like they know what they are doing, they embrace what they don’t know.

I believe the main reason we need to accept that we “don’t know what we are doing" is so we can get out of our own way and embrace the process of growing. As we renew our minds, grow spiritually, and pursue wisdom, we get better at navigating life’s complex, unique situations with God. We lose the idea that we “know what we are doing,” and we allow God to show us what He is doing and how we can partner with Him in it.

This is a very simple concept, but as we embrace its truth, it begins to impact our lives in profound ways.

- John Walt

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