I tell people all the time that one of the keys to my career success so far is that I’m really good at BS-ing.

I say it like a joke. Mostly because it is one. But also because there’s a little bit of truth buried in there.

I have spent most of my career so far working alongside people who know significantly more than I do about something. Engineers. Lawyers. Policy experts. Executives who have been working in their industries since I was learning multiplication tables.

I am very rarely the smartest person in the room (this is not self-deprecation – I have met the people in these rooms).

Earlier in my career, that intimidated me. I thought being successful meant eventually becoming the person who knew the most. I wanted to be able to answer every question confidently, understand every acronym without secretly Googling it later and contribute something sufficiently intelligent every time I opened my mouth.

For the record, there are too many acronyms. This is an industry-wide problem.

But over time, I realized I was competing in a competition no one had actually asked me to enter.

I don’t need to know more about engineering than the engineer. I don’t need to understand the law better than the lawyer. I don’t need to have 20 years of industry knowledge at 26.

What I need to know is why I’m in the room too.

We tend to think competence means having the answers. I’ve started to think it’s just as often knowing which questions to ask, recognizing what matters and being able to take something complicated and make it useful to someone else.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been calling BS-ing all these years.

Being Impressive and Being Effective Aren’t the Same Thing

There’s a particular pressure early in your career to prove that you belong.

You want to say something smart in the meeting. You don’t want to ask the question everyone else apparently already knows the answer to. And when the conversation moves into territory you don’t completely understand, you nod along and make a mental note to figure it out later.

God forbid someone discovers you don’t know everything about the job you’ve been doing for 2 months… They may revoke your Outlook access immediately.

Eventually, though, you start noticing that the people who impress you most aren’t necessarily the people who use the biggest words or have an answer for everything.

They’re often the people who can take a complicated conversation and say, “Okay, so what does this actually mean?”

Or the person who notices that everyone has spent 30 minutes debating details without answering the original question.

Or the person willing to ask the supposedly stupid question that half the room was quietly hoping someone else would ask.

Knowing a lot is valuable. Expertise matters. Even this early in my career, I’ve learned how valuable it is to have people around me who know things I don’t.

But knowing things and knowing what to do with them are different skills. The smartest answer in the room isn’t particularly useful if no one outside the room can understand it.

Maybe the BS Is Actually a Skill

When I say I’m good at BS-ing, I don’t mean I regularly walk into meetings and confidently invent facts.

That seems like an important clarification.

What I mean is that I’m comfortable operating in rooms where I don’t know everything.

I can listen to someone who knows far more about a subject than I do, pull out what actually matters and figure out how to explain it to someone who doesn’t have their expertise. I can ask enough questions to understand what I need to understand. I can read an audience and recognize when the explanation isn’t landing. I can usually figure out what information is missing and who I need to get it from.

And yes, I can sound confident while doing it. A communications degree had to be good for something.

For a long time, I discounted those things because they felt less tangible than technical expertise.

If someone can explain exactly how a complicated system works and I can explain why anyone should care, it’s pretty easy to decide which one of us sounds more impressive (hint: it isn’t me).

But those are two different skills.

Being able to translate complexity is a skill. Asking good questions is a skill. Reading the room is a skill. Knowing enough to connect the right people and information is a skill. Communicating confidently when you don’t have every answer is a skill.

Calling all of that “BS-ing” is funny, but it’s also probably selling myself a little short.

Stop Competing at Someone Else’s Thing

There will always be someone who knows more than you.

This is either deeply reassuring or deeply upsetting depending on the day.

There will be someone with more experience, more technical knowledge, another degree or an alarmingly specific understanding of a subject you learned existed three days ago.

You can spend a lot of energy trying to close every one of those gaps or you can learn from those people and figure out what you contribute that they don’t.

The best teams I’ve worked on haven’t been filled with people who are all impressive in exactly the same way. They’re filled with people whose strengths cover one another’s gaps.

Someone knows the technical answer while someone else understands the business implications. Someone sees the potential problem and someone knows the audience well enough to anticipate how they’ll react. Someone asks the question that changes the conversation and someone can take all of that and turn it into something people outside the room can actually understand.

Trying to become the smartest person in every room misses the point of having everyone else there. And as I’ve gotten more experience, I’ve become more comfortable admitting when I don’t know something.

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out” turns out to be a perfectly acceptable professional sentence. At least, no one has escorted me from a meeting for using it yet.

Sometimes it’s even more credible than pretending.

Know Why You’re in the Room

There is a difference between accepting that you don’t need to know everything and deciding you don’t need to know anything.

Unfortunately, “I’m not the subject-matter expert” is not a permanent hall pass from doing your homework.

I still want to understand the subjects I work on. I want to learn from people who know more than I do. I want to ask better questions because I understand more today than I did six months ago.

But I’m no longer trying to turn myself into a slightly worse version of the expert sitting next to me. I’d rather get really good at what I bring. Part of growing professionally is figuring out what that actually is.

Maybe you’re the person who sees patterns other people miss. Maybe you can make a decision when everyone else is stuck analyzing. Maybe people trust you enough to tell you what they’re actually thinking. Maybe you can take ten competing ideas and find the one thread connecting them.

Those skills can be harder to point to than a certification or years of technical experience, but that doesn’t make them less valuable.

The goal isn’t to walk into every room believing you’re the most impressive person there. It’s to walk in knowing you don’t have to be.

The Edit: Know What You Bring to the Room

You don’t need to compete with everyone else’s expertise to prove you deserve your seat at the table. You do need to understand what you’re contributing once you’re there.

1. Stop measuring yourself against someone else’s specialty: If someone has spent 20 years becoming an expert in something, learn from them. You don’t need to beat them at it.
2. Ask the “stupid” question: If you don’t understand something, there’s a decent chance someone else doesn’t either. Clarity is usually more useful than pretending.
3. Figure out what comes naturally to you: The things you dismiss as “just something I’m good at” may be exactly what makes you valuable.
4. Learn enough to be dangerous: You don’t need to become the expert, but you should know enough to ask informed questions, understand the implications and recognize when you need someone who knows more.
5. Get comfortable saying “I don’t know”: You can be confident without pretending to have every answer. Know what you know, know what you don’t and know how to find out.

I still joke that I’m good at BS-ing.

I’ll probably keep saying it because, frankly, it’s funnier than explaining that I’m good at synthesizing complex information and adapting communication for different audiences.

But I’m starting to give myself a little more credit for what’s underneath the joke.

I don’t have to be the person in the room who knows the most.

I just have to know what I bring to it.