The Seams Still Show

I used to bite my nails. For years. Then at some point I started getting them done - polished, every two weeks - and I noticed it made me feel more put together, more like the person I was trying to be. More confident. People who meet me now just assume the nice version is me. They never met the before.

That's basically the whole story, if you want it in one image.

Because here's the thing nobody tells you about confidence: you don't grow it like a plant. You build it, like a structure. Beam by beam, over doubt, usually while pretending the doubt isn't there. And a built thing - unlike a born one - has seams. You can always see where the pieces were joined, where you reinforced something because it was weak.

I spent most of my career looking like someone who had it figured out. First employee at a company that grew past a hundred people and eight offices. Content writer to Chief Revenue Officer. Brussels to San Francisco with a couple of bags to build a business from nothing. On paper: unstoppable. People actually used that word. I'd take it, and quietly wonder when they were going to notice I was making it up as I went.

Because I was. I took almost every one of those jobs before I was ready for one. I said yes to San Francisco before I had any idea how to do San Francisco. I became a leader before I felt like one. I walked into rooms with people far more senior than me and did the only thing I knew how to do - act like I belonged until, eventually, the acting stopped feeling like acting. That's the built confidence. It's real. I earned it.

But it never turned into the thing I thought it would. I assumed that one day I'd arrive at a version of myself that was just solid all the way through. No seams. That day kept not coming. I'd reach a level, feel like a fraud, build the confidence to match it, and get handed the next level and feel like a fraud all over again. Every seat, it turns out, you earn again in the morning.

For a long time I thought that gap - between how capable I looked and how unfinished I felt - was my personal defect. That everyone else had sealed it up and I was the only one still faking.

I don't think that anymore. I think the gap is just what being built looks like from the inside. And the seams turned out to be the useful part. The best thing anyone ever said about me at work wasn't that I was impressive - it was that I made other people braver. I could do that precisely because I still knew what not-ready feels like. You can't reassure someone from the top of a summit you're pretending you were born on.

So I've stopped trying to sand the seams down. I built this over something that started out fragile, with my own hands, and I can still see every join. That's not the flaw in it. It might be the best thing about it.

Which is a slightly ridiculous thing to be telling you in the first issue of anything - because this, right here, is the least ready I've felt in a while. A newsletter, my name on it, no title behind me anymore. It isn't finished. It could always be better. I'm honestly a little self-conscious hitting send.

I'm doing it anyway. Same as the nails. Same as San Francisco.

That's what this whole thing is going to be about, more or less. Ambition, and the life you build around it - from someone still very much building, and honest about the seams.

I'm really glad you're here.

What are the seams you still see? I'd love to hear yours.

See you next Friday, -Laurie 🤍