Pride is the
First Light

For years, people asked me, “What are you good at?” I kept hearing it as a demand to pick one thing and become it. I took advice as a challenge to surpass, and every question as another chance to find the best path to success.

My answer spans marketing, sales, partnerships, research, design, engineering and systems. I’m good enough at each of them, and I can move between them without losing context. When things get chaotic, I work best. I can connect what is happening across disciplines and work through the complexity. But I struggled to appreciate that because it didn’t sound like one thing.

In the daily pursuit of success, I lost track of myself. I started blaming my situation. Not enough resources. Wrong place. There are things I don’t have, but I was overlooking what I do have: my mind and the time in hand.

So what was holding me up? Fear of failure? No! It was the fear that my work wouldn’t match the perfect version I had imagined. Perfection in what? What an idiot I am. I had spent so much effort worrying about a standard I had not even defined.

I don’t think “What are you good at?” was the problem. It was what I thought the answer had to look like. I was trying to explain myself through one discipline when much of what I value in my work happens between them.

That doesn’t make me excellent at everything. It means I don’t need to dismiss being good enough across several things. The connections matter. Being able to work through chaos matters. Those are parts of how I work, not shortcomings I need to explain away.

I still want success. But I don’t want to keep losing myself in the effort to become an imagined version of someone else. I’m starting to appreciate the way I already think and work, and to own my shit without first demanding that it be perfect.