We don’t have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé

Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean Everyone Can

A plea to people who share inspiration porn

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

I see a lot of bad takes on Twitter, Instagram, and Medium. They start with a simple assumption: if I can do it, so can you. They share remarkable results or a story of overcoming a challenge and aim to inspire others to do the same.

They often look something like this:

Dan Rowden tweets: “You can have a job and run multiple profitable side projects with kids and +8 hours sleep.” I’m going to pick on Dan here a bit because off-hand remarks like these are really damaging. What Dan’s done is taken his unique experience of entrepreneurship, career, family, and health and collapsed it into a pithy tweet directed at “you” — presumably directed at any of his 34,000+ followers.

He’s transmuted individual experience into advice. Worse, there’s an implicit assumption that if you “can’t” accomplish what he’s accomplished, then you’re doing it wrong or just not good enough.