make (one’s) bones
v.— «Shah is a 41-year-old publisher of small provincial newspapers who made his bones after winning a bitter strike against the unions that tried to shut down his northern England operation when he brought in computers and offset presses three years ago.» —“Murdoch Challenging British Unions” by Timothy Harper Dallas Morning News (Texas) Feb. 24, 1986. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A Dallas, Texas, woman and her friends often use the expression All the things to mean something like and whatnot or as a way to signal a kind of mutual understanding, suggesting something similar to the phrase you know. This sense probably comes...
Catina from Abilene, Texas, says her young daughter and her friends fondly refer to each other with the word sigma. The slang terms sigma and sigma male were originally used in the manosphere to denote “an outsider,” and carried a...