You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know.

I love country music. Growing up in the ’90s, I had to ride a bus to school for an hour both ways, with twang on the speakers the whole time. 

One of the biggest songs from that era is “Chattahoochee” by Alan Jackson. 

Alan is one of the best selling music artists of all time, with over 75 million records sold worldwide. Thirty-five of his songs have hit #1. He’s a big deal. And something that makes him different from a lot of country artists is that he writes or co-writes most of his own songs.

When Alan wrote Chattahoochee (with songwriter Jim McBride), he thought he was mostly writing about himself and his own experiences growing up in a small town in Georgia. 

Alan didn’t think this little song about his experiences growing up would matter to anyone else. In fact, in the liner notes for his Greatest Hits album, Alan wrote: “We never thought it would be as big as it's become.” 

But he was wrong. Very wrong. 

The song was named Single of the Year by the Country Music Association (the CMA) and was #1 for several weeks on the country charts. “Chattahoochee” was everywhere for years. It was the “Smooth” for country music. You couldn’t get away from it, that’s how popular it was.

I’m sharing this story because it proves what I see all the time — that we are bad at gauging what other people want to hear from us. 

In Author Platform Builders, I advise our members to collect objective data (like open rates) for their content to see what people are resonating with, rather than relying on their own subjective feelings or opinions. That method helps them know what they don’t know. 

Similarly, when we work with folks on book proposals, my team and I start with a “Spew” conversation where nothing is off the table. Through that work, we’re usually able to uncover a topic or an approach that our client has blown off or underestimated the impact of. 

Because that’s where the magic is — in knowing what you didn’t know before.

For Alan Jackson, he didn’t know that many of his fans and country music listeners overall would resonate with his description of spending time on the Chattahoochee River. 

But they did. Knowing that, he was able to share more of himself in his music — and ended up becoming the #34 best selling artist of all time.