The 50% Rule

The simple rule that helped me go from underdog to unmatched, without working harder

Did you take Calculus in school? If you did, there’s a good chance you remember the specific day you got hit over the head with something that felt like both joy and deception—joyception.

For months, you painstakingly learned a gazillion complicated ways to determine the derivative of an equation. Your teacher taught you all this fancy stuff about how the derivative is the rate of change of a function and that it’s also the tangent line to the curve. You whipped out your graphing calculator. You sweated it out. You did math gymnastics you never thought possible. You followed every formula your teacher kept throwing your way.

But then the day of joyception arrived. Your teacher stood in front of your class and said something like, Hey, no biggie, but yeah, there’s also a shortcut to all this rocket science I’ve been teaching you. You can just take the exponent, place it in front of the equation, and then subtract one from the exponent and place it back up there.

What the f*** … yay?!

That’s what I was thinking, and I’m guessing it was your reaction, too. Joy and deception at the same time. Joyception to the nth degree.

You know what, here’s the hard truth: We had to learn all those other formulas and challenging stuff. It gave us context. It was calisthenics for our brain. It gave us options. It made us smarter and stronger.

And it’s the same for The 50% Rule. For years, I’ve been obsessed with helping people and companies use authenticity as their secret weapon, their strategic advantage. It’s what my entire first book, You Do You(ish): Unleash Your Authentic Superpowers to Get the Career You Deserve, was about.

I’ve been providing a formula/prescription/training wheels to help people change their mindsets and actions in the workplace for years.

But I realized I had a shortcut—actually, a Swiss army knife—to using authenticity in my back pocket all along. It was The 50% Rule.

It can help you do authenticity every day. It’s also a tool that will make imposter syndrome impossible, comparisons irrelevant, move you from poser to pioneer, and—my favorite—make everything you do exponentially more fun. Yes, pun intended.

We spend too much time either copying others’ formulas or trying to build a completely new spaceship. In the middle of these two approaches lies a beautiful place of growth, innovation, and leadership that feels way less icky and also brings new, better stuff into the world.

The foundation of The Rule is simple. Each time you learn something new, are stuck at a wall, are looking to create something new, etc., only take about half of what others teach you or already do as “normal” and then blend that with about half of something different, better, or that is simply more you.

The 50% Rule came to me spontaneously, but I quickly realized why The Rule is so powerful.

We often think of things as binary options. On one side of the binary bus, you hear things like, “Just do it your way” or “You do you, boo!” While that sounds exciting and empowering at first, as you start to metaphorically wear your underwear on the outside of your pants, you quickly feel awkward … nervous that “your way” feels more like you but also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. And so you retreat. Underwear back on the inside.

On the flip side of the binary bus of badassery rebellion is the safety of following the leader … playing it safe by learning from others, executing on the playbooks of the past, and doing things “right.” While it may not be as fun, it feels safe and cozy. Others have proven that underwear on the inside is a better option. Why would you want to reinvent undergarments? Best to stay on the road that others have paved.

The 50% Rule gives you permission to land in the middle. Permission to, for example, wear LED-lit underwear on the inside of your pants. That is, you can do things your way AND learn from others.

The minute I hatched The 50% Rule, something magical happened. I could immediately feel the Anxiety Ants in my stomach march away and be replaced with Motivated Moths. Bum, bum, bum turned to flittery flitter.

My Perfection Pain fleeted like a falcon. I felt free. I felt enabled. I felt like I could conquer the world. Instead of doing less, I was now set up to be and do more. Not more work. More, period. The 50% Rule creates an entirely new equation where half and half is greater than the sum of its parts.

50% + 50% > 100%

I became so obsessed with this Rule that I not only shared it with just about everyone struggling to get over their own shit-plastered walls, but I also started to see The 50% Rule everywhere!

I realized that it wasn't just a cute little mantra to get unstuck, The 50% Rule was the thread, and best kept secret, behind some of the most successful people, products, and companies in the world.

And that's when I knew it was time to write more than a cute little blog, it was time to write The 50% Rule book.

If you're ready to stop working harder and start competing in a league of your own, it's time for YOU to become a 50% Ruler!