Genius Is Overrated
No Book Is an Island & Brilliance Takes a Team
This week marks the publication date of Leadership is Overrated, the most collaborative writing project I have ever worked on. It was, like most things, a group effort. But the lessons of this book in particular are worth sharing, as they were quite personal for me.
I often tell authors the book you are writing will always test your belief in it. If there is any lack of integrity, you will feel it. When writing a diet book, you will become aware of your eating habits. When writing about money, unpaid bills might come back to haunt you. And when working on a book about leadership, for example, you may come to realize how bad of a team player you have been most of your life.
Because of your hyper attunement to a topic you’ve just spent the greater part of a year (or longer) focusing on, any discrepancy between what you’ve said and how you’ve been living will bubble up to the surface. This is inevitable. What we do with these gaps, however, is up to us.
In 2013, when I published a memoir about enjoying the pauses in between major moments in life, I felt conflicted about marketing it. It seemed disingenuous to go on and on about the amazing bonuses readers would miss out on if they didn’t purchase the book right now. I called a fellow author for advice, and she said, “The marketing of the book cannot undermine the message.” I leaned back and let it do what it needed to do—which wasn’t much.
After that book, which can fairly be called a “flop,” I went all out with the next one and attempted to turn it into a bestseller. I not only wrote something with widespread appeal but enlisted hundreds of partners and promoters to get the word out. Those efforts, which were equal parts exciting and stressful, forever changed the course of my career. The book hit most bestseller lists and elevated my reach and influence as an author. In it, I wrote: “Every story of success is really a story of community.” But I didn’t really know what I was saying.
Every story of success is really a story of community.
A couple years later, I repeated this process, writing another book that debuted as a bestseller, but the routine started to feel tired. Continually trying to top my last achievement felt increasingly dissatisfying. Maybe what I needed wasn’t another ego stroke.
During the pandemic, a radio host called and asked me to share some thoughts on what to do in these “in-between times,” referencing that book from 2013. It was fun to share stories and insights from an otherwise unsuccessful project, reminding me that after a work is “done,” it continues to live on in the minds and hearts of an audience.
To this day, readers regularly write to say how impactful that quiet collection of stories was for them. I can relate. Out of everything I’ve written, it is still my favorite to reread. I am always surprised by little lines that grab me, ones I forgot were written by my own hands. Sometimes, when we let a work take on a life of its own, that means letting go of what we thought it must be so that it can be what it is. That book wasn’t a success to me, but the readers it reached would certainly disagree.
Last year, the editor of a major publisher asked me who edited one of my books, and I couldn’t remember. “Oh, Jeff,” she said, “that’s not good.” She was right. But in my experience, this is quite common. Creative work is a vocation that inevitably attracts and foments narcissism. We often ascribe unhealthy levels of brilliance to individuals who win in this area while forgetting all the people who helped them produce their work.
It is somewhat of a secret in the publishing industry that the person whose name appears on a book cover is but one in a list of co-conspirators who have come together to make the project possible. The average person has no idea how many people it takes to produce even a relatively short and simple work. Just read the Acknowledgements of any nonfiction book and you’ll see a series of individuals who helped bring it to life. Once you discount the obligatory thank-yous to mom and dad and “My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” you’re left with a good-sized group of humans who were involved in every word that ended up on the page.
Each book I’ve written has been the resulting work of a team of editors, publishers, designers, and researchers. It is not a small amount of people—literally dozens of people long. But who wants to hear this, much less believe it? From a very early age, we are told a tale about genius that is all about us. We want to believe we are the heroes of our own stories, commanders of a destiny we will into existence.
When Beyonce’s “Lemonade” came out and listed 72 contributors in the liner notes, there was a deluge of online criticism and think pieces about her so-called genius, illustrating our obsession in America with individual achievement. The truth is there is always a long line of supporters standing behind the most gifted of individuals. We just so often refuse to see it, because we don’t want to believe it.
In the creative agency I help run, we like to say that “genius is a team sport.” There is a preponderance of academic research to support such a claim, but any half-aware human can see it throughout the world and in their own life. Corporate executives have boards to consult and to hold them accountable. Political leaders have cabinets of advisors. And many of us have friends and neighbors to rely on for one thing or another. We need each other—in ways we can barely conceive and far more often than we realize.
A few years ago, I stepped back from my public work as an author and started a new career as a ghostwriter. It was my way of working through some personal issues and existential questions that could not be answered in the world. Only when I gradually began letting go of my deep need to feel important in front of other people did I become aware of how much assistance I’d been receiving all along.
While “I” had been chasing “my” dream, there were many other players at work, those who were silently supporting me in ways that my fragile ego could not recognize. During a particularly rough season in my life, I was surprised to see how many friends showed up for me, unannounced. New and old acquaintances arrived in surprising ways to offer support that felt gratuitously generous. And it didn’t let up for years. The experience left me humbled at how little I could accomplish on my own. As it turns out, it’s not just success that takes a team—survival does, too.
It’s not just success that takes a team—survival does, too.
Still, the myth of lone genius persists and pervades our modern society. We award Nobels and Pulitzers to individuals instead of the cast of characters who supported them. We celebrate inflection points in history without acknowledging the necessary plateaus it takes to get there. I’m not saying remarkable individuals or events don’t exist; they most certainly do. I am just saying they never appear in isolation, and the importance we give them is often misunderstood. The greatest contributions to humanity do not come just from a scraggly savant living in the mountains. There is always a team.
Leadership is Overrated is a book that attempts to debunk this modern myth of organizational success and our over-emphasis on charismatic individuals. With Navy SEALs as the primary example, the authors (one a SEAL himself and the other a successful executive) offer the concept of “self-led teams” as an antidote to our cultural obsession with self-made men and women. In corporate America especially, we spend billions of dollars each year on leadership development, and it is, by all accounts, a waste. We’ve been investing in leaders to create better teams when we should have been pointing our focus elsewhere.
The book begins with the story of the Belgica, one of the first ships to ever visit Antarctica and return: an adventure that ends in near-catastrophe but is saved by a handful of shipmates who step up to lead when the leaders become ill. When the vessel returns, the captain is branded a hero, and everyone else is largely forgotten. The authors of the book—Chris Mefford and Kyle Buckett—argue that we have to stop lionizing leaders and instead accept our universal responsibility to create change, wherever we are in the hierarchy. Until we do this, our organizations will never be as great as they could be.
It’s not often that the message of a book echoes the way in which it was made. This project itself was a collaboration, a self-led team of sorts. The authors provided a lot of the source material and initial research; and our team, which included a couple of writers, a researcher, fact checker, and an editor (not to mention the staff at the publisher) all came together to bring the message into existence. It was, in fact, such a collaborative effort that you could point to a given sentence in the book and I wouldn’t be able to remember who actually came up with it. A lot of life is like that. Credit is overrated. The work is what matters.
Credit is overrated. The work is what matters.
I say all this to illustrate a point, and perhaps, offer a confession. To create anything, especially a book, you must know what you are signing up for: not a series of lightning-strike inspirations but an arduous march into ego obliteration. If you are fortunate, you will have a necessary corps of collaborators to help you endure the otherwise-impossible journey. Without them, you will likely get lost in the weeds of your own arrogance and fail to produce anything worthwhile. Or if you do, you’ll be deluded into thinking you did it all by yourself. Which is just as bad—because success is only sweet when shared with others.
It takes a village to raise a baby, and it takes a team to build a book. But it also requires a community to make a person. Not just birth a human being but actually produce someone who has character and integrity. The trouble comes when we believe our own mythologies about what “we” did, failing to recognize all the help we’ve needed along the way just to keep going.
None of us came into the world alone. Every breath we take is, in fact, a process we are all participating in. Just about any brand of significance we can apply to an individual is not always what it seems. Yes, we are each special; but we are also connected in ways that are unfathomable. All I’m saying is that when we put pen to paper or come up with our next brilliant idea, we would be wise to consider who else deserves the credit for what comes next.
P.S. If you are interested in learning more about the topic of creative collaboration and unconventional teams, here is a list of resources worth checking out:
P.P.S. Many thanks to the folks who made this recent project possible, including: Erik Deckers, Ashton Renshaw, Sandy Kreps, Chris Johnson, Chantel Goins, Chris Mefford, Kyle Buckett, Mickey Maudlin, Roger Freet, Chantal Tom, Louise Braverman, Michelle Neumayer. It really does take a team.
P.P.P.S. If you are interested in working with our team, and have previous ghostwriting experience, fill out this form. We are also looking for a handful of editors and designers. You can contact me directly about that via email.
Thanks for being a key part of the team that launched my book a little over a decade ago. I learned this lesson then and have seen it to be true since then.
Congratulations to you and your team on the launch, Jeff. A team celebration sure beats a solo one!