I Didn't Know How

This week I walked into a room where I didn't really know how anything worked.

It was my first investors' night - a new world, a side of the table I'd never sat on. And a few minutes in, I caught myself thinking a very specific thought. Not a nervous one. A familiar one: I have no idea how to do this yet.

I know that thought well. I've built most of my life on it.

The first time I remember thinking it clearly was in 2014, when I said yes to becoming the first employee of a Brussels startup most people assumed would crash - over the safer, bigger, more than double the salary version my dad gently begged me to take. I've told that story before: the decision, the leap, trusting my gut over the spreadsheet.

What I never really talk about is what happened the morning after I said yes.

I showed up to a job I had no idea how to do.

The role was everything at once - blog posts, the live chat, social strategy, product demos, proposals, contracts, product feedback - all of it, from day one. I didn't know how to do most of it. And honestly, I don't think the founders fully did either. So we leaned on the one thing we could actually control: effort. Common sense, a lot of sweat, trying it one way, getting it wrong, trying it another. Borrowing from the companies ahead of us. Showing up every single day and out-working what we didn't know yet.

For a long time I thought that was just how a startup feels. Lately I've realized it was something more specific. It was the actual shape of betting on yourself - and it looks nothing like the confident, cinematic thing people picture.

Betting on yourself isn't being sure it'll work out. I was never sure. It's betting that you will work - that whatever you don't know how to do, you'll out-work until you figure it out.

The outcome is never fully in your hands. The effort always is. That's the one variable you control - which is exactly why it never felt as reckless to me as it looked from the outside.

So twelve years later, standing in that investors' room as a total beginner, what I felt wasn't fear. It was recognition. I don't know how to do this yet - and I've learned to trust the part of me that will figure it out.

Have you ever said yes to something you had no idea how to do - and just trusted you'd figure it out? I'd love to hear about it.

See you next Friday, -Laurie 🤍