Episode 11
Nobody knows what they're doing!
Nobody Knows What They’re Doing
Have you ever found yourself glancing around a room (or a Zoom meeting, or a group chat, or the chaos of your living room) and wondered, “Who put me in charge—don’t they know I still feel sixteen most days?” Yeah, me too.
In this episode of “Different, Not Broken,” I, Lauren Howard—L2 for the cool kids —am letting you in on the messiest, most liberating secret of adulthood: nobody, and I mean nobody, actually knows what they’re doing.
This isn’t some polished, performative encouragement to “fake it ‘til you make it.” I am talking about pulling back the curtain on why even the experts you look up to are mostly winging it.
I share my real experiences from the trenches—whether that’s running a telehealth company (where people call me for the right answer and I’m hunting for the adult in the room just like you), navigating ultra-complex compliance laws (with the help of attorneys who actually give me more “choose your own adventure” than clear answers), or trying to make sense of parenting a tiny human who bites (and I mean literally bites—this is not a metaphor).
So why should you listen? Because if you’ve ever felt the crushing weight of thinking you’re the only one improvising—newsflash, you aren’t.
I talk through the reality that none of us are actually the “adultier adult” we’re desperately searching for.
So, if you want to hear the truth about life behind the curtain—about what really happens when everyone is supposedly “adulting”—come hang out with me. We’ll laugh, we might cry, but we’ll definitely call B.S. on the myth of the perfectly composed grown-up.
And if you somehow find that mythical actual adult who has it all figured out, send them my way. Until then, I’ll be right here, fumbling forward, and inviting you to do the same.
Love you, mean it.
Timestamped summary
00:00 Unfiltered Expertise and Telehealth Insight
05:11 Imposter Syndrome Amid Experienced Peers
08:12 Indecision in Legal Consultations
12:40 Embracing Uncertainty and Growth
16:00 "Vacation with Kids: Not Restful"
16:46 "No Obligation to Perform"
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Transcript
If you're like me and you are always looking for the person who knows what they're doing, I have some bad news.
Speaker A:We'll talk about that.
Speaker A:All right, here we go.
Speaker A:I'm gonna pretend I'm pushing record, because that feels right.
Speaker A:Okay, I'm pressing record.
Speaker A:Boop.
Speaker A:Hi, everybody.
Speaker A:I'm Lauren Howard.
Speaker A:I go by L2.
Speaker A:Yes, you can call me L2.
Speaker A:Everybody does.
Speaker A:It's a long story.
Speaker A:It's actually not that long a story, but we'll save it for another time.
Speaker A:Welcome to Different, Not Broken, which is our podcast on exactly that.
Speaker A:That there are a lot of people in this world walking around feeling broken, and the reality is you're just different.
Speaker A:And that's fine.
Speaker A:So, quick rundown of the rules.
Speaker A:We talk about this every time.
Speaker A:If you want to know more about them, pop back to our first episode.
Speaker A:First, I'm going to curse a lot if bad language is a problem.
Speaker A:Sorry.
Speaker A:Second, I'm going to tell a lot of stories, even on things that don't sound like they have stories.
Speaker A:Third, I'm going to tell a bunch of dead dad jokes.
Speaker A:It's just par for the course around here.
Speaker A:And fourth, anything that comes out of your face is appropriate here, so you do not have to worry about filtering any part of you to join us in this space.
Speaker A:So every now and then, like I'll be with my kids, making decisions for them, or at work running one of my companies, doing the various and sundry and very like high level expertise requiring things that I do all day.
Speaker A:This is not a brag.
Speaker A:It's kind of a brag, but it's not a brag.
Speaker A:When I say there are like a handful of people in the world who can do what I do in the telehealth space.
Speaker A:Like, I don't know how I stumbled into this knowledge, but my attorney calls me asking for guidance on things.
Speaker A:Like, I have questions about where my retainer goes, but that's a different question.
Speaker A:But like the things that I know and can do in the telehealth space, the ways that I am knowledgeable on constructing 50 state entities and MSLPC structures and all of the things that you have to do to run compliant telehealth organizations while still protecting your provider licensure, still paying attention to all of the different licensing laws, all of the different corporate practice medicine laws.
Speaker A:Like, there are not a lot of people in this world who can do what I do.
Speaker A:And also I spend a lot of time going, why do they let a 16 year old do all this Work.
Speaker A:Like, why are they trusting a 16 year old with this information?
Speaker A:Because clearly I am still 16 and I just got the keys to my Volkswagen Beetle.
Speaker A:And the biggest thing I have to worry about this week is opening night on Friday where we are gonna sing a musical and then go to Denny's afterward.
Speaker A:That's my life, right?
Speaker A:And then I look around and realize that those children who are screaming for mom are screaming for me.
Speaker A:They're not actually screaming, they're fine.
Speaker A:If they're screaming, it's because they are being lazy and they don't want to get off the couch.
Speaker A:They're fine.
Speaker A:There's no emergency.
Speaker A:Probably my 6 year old who has decided that her life supine is, is preferred and she needs to be brought water and grapes.
Speaker A:Like they're screaming for me.
Speaker A:Like my phone rings and it's one of my employees asking me how to handle a situation and it's because they expect me to handle it.
Speaker A:Like somewhere this expectation got set that I am the adult in the room.
Speaker A:And I do not remember consenting to that.
Speaker A:I mean, I'm 38 now.
Speaker A:That's not old, but it's certainly not a child.
Speaker A:I'm far closer to 40 than I ever thought possible.
Speaker A:I'm way closer to 40 than I am 20, and that's terrifying.
Speaker A:But I thought by the time I got to almost 40, which is a thing I can say out loud and only vomit in my mouth a little bit, by the time that I got to almost 40, I would feel like the person who knew what they were doing.
Speaker A:And I say this as a person who by and large knows what she's doing.
Speaker A:I am like one of the people in the country who know what I'm doing about what I do.
Speaker A:And I am still waiting for the day that I'm gonna wake up and feel like I know what I'm doing.
Speaker A:It hasn't happened yet.
Speaker A:I remember when we closed our practice after my dad died, I left there feeling like I had no work experience to speak of.
Speaker A:Because everything I had done there I had made up as I went.
Speaker A:I had no training.
Speaker A:I just had to figure it out.
Speaker A:And I figured it out.
Speaker A:Well, we grew to a multi site clinic.
Speaker A:We had multimillion dollars in revenue.
Speaker A:We had an entire staff that didn't exist when I started.
Speaker A:I mean, I had done the things, no question, I had done the things.
Speaker A:But because I hadn't gone to school for it and I didn't follow a specific roadmap for it, and I kind of just made it up as I went.
Speaker A:I assumed that the way I had learned it was not valid, was not real.
Speaker A:Everybody else knew what they were doing, and I was just making it up as I went.
Speaker A:And after that job, I moved to another company with people who had had multiple exits from previous companies and made a lot of money.
Speaker A:And I ended up in a lot of meetings with these things, same people where we were all going, okay, well, what's the solution here?
Speaker A:What do we do?
Speaker A:And I realized that none of us had been in this situation before.
Speaker A:Despite what our past histories and our experience was, none of us had been in this situation before.
Speaker A:So this feeling that I was the only person who didn't know what I was doing, it pretty quickly became evident that, like, even these very successful dudes who had lots to show for it, still spent a lot of time going, we gotta find a solution because we're not sure what it is.
Speaker A:So if they're constantly in situations where we're still trying to come up with ways to handle things, maybe it doesn't have to do with the fact that I don't have the right experience or I didn't do things the way that the book says.
Speaker A:You're supposed to do this.
Speaker A:There's no book.
Speaker A:The book doesn't exist.
Speaker A:There's no manual.
Speaker A:I spent most of my young adult life going, well, I didn't follow a book.
Speaker A:I didn't follow the way you're supposed to, Therefore, I can't be doing it right.
Speaker A:There's no book.
Speaker A:But I looked around and went, okay, these people who are literally 20 years ahead of me in their careers are just as confused as I am.
Speaker A:And so I kind of lived in that space where I was like, okay, well, I don't know.
Speaker A:And you don't know.
Speaker A:There's got to be an adultier adult somewhere who does know.
Speaker A:We need to go find the better adult.
Speaker A:There's an adult in the room somewhere, and we have to go find them.
Speaker A:And so we would go, like, talk to the attorneys.
Speaker A:What does the attorney say?
Speaker A:You think you're gonna go get a definitive answer from your attorney, right?
Speaker A:Like, when you're reached a point where you're not sure what to do, you go talk to the attorney.
Speaker A:That's like the wisdom you always get, right?
Speaker A:And you go talk to the attorney, and the attorney will give you, like, the law says this or the law says that.
Speaker A:But when you're talking about a new situation that nobody's been in before or that none of you really have experienced before, what the attorney's gonna give you is an assessment of risk.
Speaker A:You could do this, you could do that, you could do this.
Speaker A:I think this is low risk.
Speaker A:I think that's low risk.
Speaker A:I think this is a little higher risk, but I'm not too worried about it.
Speaker A:I would probably stay away from that one.
Speaker A:Cause that's super high risk.
Speaker A:But you know what?
Speaker A:You don't leave that conversation with the book that you were looking for, the thing that tells you, oh, this is the right thing to do in this situation.
Speaker A:I've almost never left a conversation with one of our corporate attorneys and had their take on what you should do, that I've left with brisk stratification, if you will.
Speaker A:So, okay, I went to the more experienced people.
Speaker A:They don't have the answer.
Speaker A:I went to the attorney, the person with the malpractice insurance that is supposed to protect me if they give me bad advice.
Speaker A:They gave me information so that I could make a decision, but they didn't tell me what to do.
Speaker A:And we still don't have a decision.
Speaker A:Is it possible, Is there a world where the reason that I am struggling with this decision or.
Speaker A:Or we don't know what the actual answer to this decision is because there is not one specific answer to this situation.
Speaker A:And we're just doing the best that we can.
Speaker A:And once you settle into that, you realize that even the most experienced people who you have ever met who have been doing this forever in most areas are just making it up as they go.
Speaker A:Nobody knows what they're doing.
Speaker A:I have never met a good adult who.
Speaker A:Who knew what they were doing.
Speaker A:Everybody is making it up as you go.
Speaker A:There's no roadmap, there's no plan, there's no guidebook.
Speaker A:You're just like, this sounds right?
Speaker A:Like, especially with parenting, everybody told me it would get easier with the second kid because I'd done it before.
Speaker A:But they don't tell you that the second kid is so wildly different from the first kid that you might as well have never done it before.
Speaker A:My first baby, she laughed all the time.
Speaker A:She loved everybody.
Speaker A:She never met a stranger.
Speaker A:She smiled constantly.
Speaker A:The only thing that we ever had to worry about was the fact that she was a puker and she puked all the time.
Speaker A:That's it.
Speaker A:She was the easiest baby.
Speaker A:And they do that.
Speaker A:They do that on purpose.
Speaker A:They do that on purpose to make you think this wasn't that hard.
Speaker A:Mother Nature wants a second baby.
Speaker A:And so it is going to give me amnesia about the shitty parts and make me remember this sweet, smiling, easy baby who made My life so simple and made parenting seem so easy.
Speaker A:And then they give you the second kid who chooses violence every day of their life.
Speaker A:Doesn't sleep, hits, bites, bites.
Speaker A:That's not me being dramatic.
Speaker A:She bites.
Speaker A:Not anymore.
Speaker A:She did when she was a baby.
Speaker A:And you're like, where's all this mother's intuition that was supposed to make this second one easier?
Speaker A:It's not there.
Speaker A:I have lots of mother's intuition.
Speaker A:It didn't make anything easier.
Speaker A:She is a totally different kid.
Speaker A:There are no similarities between the first one and the second one.
Speaker A:Not even between their gastrointestinal systems.
Speaker A:They could not be more different.
Speaker A:So the point being that even those of us who are experienced at things the second time, it's totally different.
Speaker A:We are all making it up as we go.
Speaker A:It is very rare that you end up in a situation where you have an actual roadmap of what you're supposed to do.
Speaker A:If you, like, start a new job, you can hope that they give you, like, two training programs that, like, tell you where to click and what things to use.
Speaker A:Life doesn't work that way.
Speaker A:You don't even get two cars that drive the same way.
Speaker A:I have a cousin who's a.
Speaker A:Who's helicopter pilot in the Marine, and we were talking one time about how everybody simplifies medicine on television.
Speaker A:If you watch television, like, everybody, like, you go to the doctor and everybody gets diagnosed with lupus, and then everybody gets better and it's fine.
Speaker A:And he was like, yeah, well, it's also like that as a helicopter pilot, he's like, do you know how many helicopters I know how to fly?
Speaker A:The ones I've been trained on to fly?
Speaker A:If you put me in a helicopter, I've never flown in before, I can't help you.
Speaker A:I have not been trained on that helicopter.
Speaker A:And that's the way everything's a different helicopter.
Speaker A:Everything's a different helicopter.
Speaker A:Please don't make it up as you go.
Speaker A:If you're flying a helicopter, though, like, get.
Speaker A:Actually get training.
Speaker A:I'm just saying, like, that's one of the things that there's, like, not a lot of margin for error on.
Speaker A:And I don't want you making up as you go, but, like, another day running your business as a neurodivergent person who isn't exactly sure how to handle this interaction.
Speaker A:We're all making it up.
Speaker A:There's no guidebook.
Speaker A:There's no manual.
Speaker A:We just figure it out.
Speaker A:And if you're still.
Speaker A:If you're like me, and I don't think this will ever end.
Speaker A:If you're like me and you're always looking for the person who knows, knows what's coming or who has been here before, you can find mentors who have enough perspective on life to know things like, it all comes out in the wash or this feels really awful right now, but odds are, in a year you're not even going to remember it.
Speaker A:You can find people like that, but you're not going to find somebody who has life figured out.
Speaker A:That person doesn't exist.
Speaker A:And so if you've gotten to the point that you've gotten to with the skills that you have, with the experiences that you have, by and large, you've done your best.
Speaker A:Maybe you don't know what's next, but you know what you want to try next, or you know that there is something you want to try next, or you're open to new possibilities or whatever.
Speaker A:Sometimes that's as much roadmap as we get, and that's got to be okay.
Speaker A:I don't want to be the one to break this to you.
Speaker A:And this is not to say that you shouldn't have a support system, because support systems are amazing and you definitely need to have one.
Speaker A:And if you don't have one, like, let's figure out how to get you on, because you deserve one.
Speaker A:But whenever I think about the adultier adult in the room, I think back to.
Speaker A:I think it was a tweet I saw.
Speaker A:I don't use Twitter anymore.
Speaker A:This was many, many years ago.
Speaker A:And all it said was, do you ever watch your parents with your own kids and wonder how you survived?
Speaker A:Yes, all the time.
Speaker A:But also, that's the adultier adult in the room.
Speaker A:And so you're looking for a support system probably more than you're looking for the person who actually has it figured out.
Speaker A:Because none of us have it figured out.
Speaker A:I need to know how to answer.
Speaker A:How was your trip?
Speaker A:Because it really wasn't a vacation.
Speaker A:But mostly I'm just tired of talking with everybody and their brother about it.
Speaker A:So I wind up with, it was okay.
Speaker A:And I know that comes off as dismissive.
Speaker A:I need a better way to be dismissive.
Speaker A:I think people are going to hear me say this a lot in response to some of these questions.
Speaker A:First off, saying it was okay is not dismissive.
Speaker A:You are only required to answer questions that you want to answer or that you have a reason to answer.
Speaker A:Unless you are somehow, like, contractually obligated to answer that question.
Speaker A:Which is unlikely, but I guess it's possible.
Speaker A:But also, I think a lot of parents run into this problem.
Speaker A:I don't know if this person specifically is a parent, but I want to use this example as an example.
Speaker A:If a parent goes on a trip with their children, that is not a vacation.
Speaker A:It's a trip because you're working the whole time.
Speaker A:You're corralling them and you're entertaining them and you're feeding them and you're taking them places and you're keeping them busy.
Speaker A:You're feeling bad about how much screen time you're giving them in a place where they should be going and playing and enjoying the sights.
Speaker A:But you also want a break.
Speaker A:And so you come back from that.
Speaker A:And people are always like, how's your vacation?
Speaker A:And you're like, there was a vacation.
Speaker A:I took a trip.
Speaker A:I went to a place, but my children were there.
Speaker A:And that's not to say that you can't have fun with your children, because I have a blast with my kids, and I love going places and spending time with my kids.
Speaker A:But also, I do not come back feeling rested.
Speaker A:And so I think this actually comes up a lot more than people realize, because anybody who has ever traveled with children knows that there is, like, you need a vacation after your quote unquote vacation, because you are not rested and definitely not fulfilled, especially if there's water involved.
Speaker A:Dear Lord.
Speaker A:But I also think if somebody says, how was your vacation?
Speaker A:And it wasn't a vacation, you can just say, oh, you know, it wasn't really a vacation.
Speaker A:We got done what we needed to get done there, but we'll take a vacation at some point to make up for it, and that could just be it.
Speaker A:You don't have to give them more information than that.
Speaker A:You'll hear me say this a ton.
Speaker A:You don't have to perform.
Speaker A:You don't have to perform because somebody else asked you a question.
Speaker A:There's not an obligation to perform back.
Speaker A:You can just say like, it was all right.
Speaker A:I don't really have much else to say about it.
Speaker A:And if they take that offensively because it's just not something you want to talk about.
Speaker A:Like, that's probably not a person you want to be having small talk with.
Speaker A:Thanks for being here, guys.
Speaker A:Have a good day.
Speaker A:Love you.
Speaker A:Mean it.
Speaker A:I'm trying to think of something I hate more than rfk.
Speaker A:I can't come up with anything.
Speaker A:What a giant, ignorant jackass.
Speaker A:I hate him so much.
Speaker A:We could do an entire episode of just me expressing how much I hate him.
Speaker A:I hate him so much.
