The Score Will Take Care of Itself

I was at dinner last Tuesday with my wife when I got a text message from a friend:

Dude Ali Abdaal just name dropped Bookworm 🤯

For those who aren’t familiar, Ali Abdaal is a YouTuber I’ve followed and admired from afar for awhile now. And he had just released a new video titled 20 Podcasts that Made Me a Millionaire where he mentioned the Bookworm podcast I do with Joe Buhlig.

But his team had linked to the wrong Bookworm podcast. Instead of pointing to our show which he was talking about in the video, the link pointed to the KCRW podcast in the Apple Podcasts directory.

So close!

I know it was an honest mistake. I reached out when I saw the issue, and his team very quickly fixed the link. But it was a couple of days before I noticed it and they corrected it, and by that time 100,000+ people had been pointed to the wrong show.

To be honest, it was a little bit discouraging. This was the closest I had ever been to having something go viral, and it was disappointing that we missed out on the initial excitement and traffic from the release of the video.

But after a moment, I gathered my thoughts and told my wife:

“It will all shake out in the end.”

But I wouldn’t have always responded that way.

I used to think that I needed to pull the right levers and create my own luck. There was a time when I would have felt crushed that I had come so close to catching lightning in a bottle and missed.

When you follow people online, it’s easy to see just the highlights. You hear stories of people who seem to be in the right place at the right time, and you wonder why that never happens for you.

But the truth is that a successful life is often full of near misses like this. And if you continue to do things the right way, the score will take care of itself.

And hey, it’s still really cool to find out that Ali Abdaal listens to Bookworm!

I can’t control the fact that someone grabbed the wrong link to my podcast. All I can do is create the very best show I can. And if I make something exceptional enough, other people will notice.

One of my favorite Bible verses is Proverbs 22:29, which says:

Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.

The takeaway here is pretty clear: keep striving for excellence, and the score will take care of itself.

Jim Rohn says it this way: work harder on yourself than you do on your job. What you do isn’t nearly as important as who you become in the process.

Perhaps you’ve been in a similar situation. Maybe you crushed a project at work, and someone else got the credit (and the promotion). Or maybe you feel your contributions go unnoticed.

You can’t control what other people think. All you can control is what you do.

No matter what happens – keep going, and keep growing.

It will all shake out in the end.

— Mike