Mitch Carson has spent thirty years turning invisible people into undeniable ones. NBC host, international speaker across sixty-three countries, sixth dan black belt, and the man who coined the term Authority Architecture. He has built entire frameworks around being seen. Being found. Being unmistakably, searchably you in a marketplace that rewards it.
I went into our conversation wanting to ask him about all of that.
I came out wanting to ask him something else entirely.
The Parthenon of You
Mitch has a metaphor he uses for authority, and it is a good one.
Think of the Parthenon. Multiple columns holding up one structure. Take one column away and it is still standing, because the strength was never in any single pillar. It was in all of them together.
Column one is knowing your message. Column two might be podcasting. Another could be publishing, citations, LinkedIn, or being quoted in Forbes. Pull enough of them up and you have built something that does not fall over the first time one column cracks.
It is a smart way to think about building a career, a brand, or a body of work. Redundancy as resilience. Do not put everything on one pillar, because pillars crumble.
But somewhere in the middle of all that architecture talk, Mitch said something almost in passing that I have not stopped thinking about since.
Everybody Else Is Taken
He was talking about mentors and the pressure to model yourself on someone further along than you.
Find your guru. Find your person. Copy the blueprint.
Mitch does not do that. He has not for years.
"I can't pretend to be anybody else," he said, "because everybody else is taken."
It is a throwaway line delivered like a joke.
It is not one.
It is the whole conversation in six words, and it is the opposite instinct to everything else we had just spent twenty minutes discussing.
Authority Architecture is about building something the market can find and recognise. "Everybody else is taken" is about the thing underneath that. The version of you that exists whether or not anyone is searching for it.
Those two ideas are not in conflict. But they are not the same project either.
I think it is easy to spend so long building the columns that you forget to check who is actually standing under the roof.
The Version You Give Strangers
I brought up something the speaker Eric Worre once said about the toll of giving everything on stage.
Worre had spent years walking out to rooms full of strangers with full energy, full presence and the best version of himself, every single time.
Then he would go home.
What was left for the people who actually knew him was whatever had not already been spent. His family were getting the leftovers of a man who had given his best self away to people he might never see again.
I raised it half expecting Mitch to wave it off.
He did not.
It was a real epiphany for him too, realising his own friends and family were not getting the best version of him either. Strangers on stage were getting that version for free.
But it is the question underneath his answer that has stayed with me.
Most of us who do anything visible for a living, speaking, podcasting, building a brand, posting or creating for an audience, know exactly what Worre meant.
There is a version of you that shows up when something is being recorded, watched or built for an audience.
And there is a version that shows up when nothing is.
The question is not which one is more polished.
It is which one is more true.
And whether the people who matter most are getting the real one, or the tired understudy.
Authority Is Not the Same as Authenticity
This is what stayed with me once we stopped recording.
Authority is something you build.
Mitch is right about that. It is earned, column by column, over years.
But authenticity is not built the same way.
You cannot architect your way into being yourself.
You either are, or you are performing a very convincing impression of it. One that gets harder to keep up the longer the cameras stay on.
Mitch talked about being an introverted extrovert, comfortable alone and comfortable in a crowd. He also spoke about credibility and authenticity being able to live in the same body.
I believe him.
But he did not fully answer the question I was actually asking, and I do not think it was his to answer.
It is yours.
Who are you when the lights are off?
Are you the same person when they are on?
"I can't pretend to be anybody else, because everybody else is taken."
- Mitch Carson
Play of the Week
This week, I am flipping the whole conversation on its head.
Forget the columns. Forget the platforms, the pillars, the AI search optimisation and all the very sensible things Mitch spent thirty years learning to do well.
Instead, do one thing this week that is just for you.
Something with no audience, nothing to post and nothing to capture.
Not for your feed.
Not for your brand.
Not even for this article.
Do it because it makes you feel like you again.
Then notice what that feels like, being visible only to yourself.
That is the whole assignment.
This article is part of Articles & Reflections from The Element of Play, Jodi Salmond's work exploring adult play, burnout recovery, playful leadership, self-connection and more human ways of living and leading.
