Most people hear the Don Draper quote as advice about reading other people. I think he was talking about something else entirely — and it took a medieval language professor building an entire world in secret for me to see it.

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The Oxford Professor Nobody Really Knew

J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor at Oxford. A specialist in medieval languages — Old English, Old Norse, Finnish. His colleagues respected him as a serious academic. That was the map the world had for him. It was not wrong exactly. It was just about twenty percent of the picture.

For seventeen years — in the evenings, in the margins of exam papers he was marking, in notebooks nobody else read — Tolkien was building an entire world. Not just a story. A world with its own languages, its own history, its own mythology going back thousands of years. Languages he had invented himself, from scratch, because he needed them to exist.

He wasn’t writing Lord of the Rings to be published. He was writing it because it was the thing he could not not do.

“His closest friends thought he was wasting his time. The academic world had a label for him. The label wasn’t wrong — it just had no room for what he was actually building.”

When Lord of the Rings was finally published — after being rejected, after being told it was too long, too strange, too uncommercial — it became the second bestselling novel ever written. Over 150 million copies. A world that began in the margins of exam papers, driven entirely by an incentive structure that existed only inside one man’s head.

He never started over. He never changed what he was building to fit what the room expected. He just kept going until the world ran out of reasons to ignore him.

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The Idea from This Week

Incentives Determine Everything

I was listening to a podcast this week about game theory — the actual academic discipline, not the metaphor. There’s a principle in it that I keep coming back to: the incentives you build around a system determine the behavior that comes out of it. Not the rules. Not the intentions. The incentives.

I think the same thing is true for identity. The incentive structure you build around who you are determines whether you keep going or whether you stop.

If your identity is built on external incentives — approval, recognition, other people’s understanding of what you do — then you will stop every time those incentives disappear. Every time someone can’t categorize you. Every time the label doesn’t fit. You’ll feel the pull to start over with something more legible.

But if the incentive is internal — if it’s simply who you are, not what people think of it — then there’s nothing to restart. The behavior continues because the identity is stable.

Tolkien didn’t need Oxford to understand what he was building. The incentive wasn’t their approval. It never was.

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Something Personal

The World Doesn’t Have Language Yet for What I’m Building

If you asked ten people who know me what I do, you would get ten completely different answers. Some would say I run a gym. Some would say I coach. Some have heard the word mentor and have no real idea what that means in practice.

For a long time that used to bother me. I wanted to be legible. I wanted a clean sentence that made people nod and move on. But I’ve stopped trying to correct the picture one person at a time.

Because I realized something — the people who can explain exactly what they do in one sentence are usually the ones who stopped before they got to the interesting part.

The world doesn’t have language yet for what I’m building. That used to feel like a problem. Now it just feels like an accurate description of where I am in the process.

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Back to Don Draper

“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.”

— Don Draper, Mad Men

What he doesn’t say — what I think is the real thing underneath it — is that we do the same thing to ourselves. We tell ourselves who we are through our behavior, every single day. And then we look away because we want ourselves to be something more legible. More finished. More understood.

Tolkien told himself who he was every evening for seventeen years. In the margins. In the notebooks. In the invented languages nobody had asked for. He was building the incentive structure from the inside out. And when the world finally showed up — it had no choice but to accept what had already been built.

You don’t need permission to be who you already are. You just need to stop waiting for the world’s categorization system to catch up.

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That’s it. Go make something of the week. Whatever you’re walking into right now — you’re not behind. You’re not starting over. The world is just catching up.