Pause and Polish

How should we tell our story? From the beginning, the middle looking back, the middle looking forward, a series of pivotal moments, from where we’d like to end up?

Whenever I listen to interviews of successful people, they always speak from a place of knowing. They speak about their experiences or share mental frameworks to break complex questions into more manageable chunks. They act as if they know exactly what to do in each situation. In reality, they had to figure out many of the things that they are speaking to now with many mistakes along the way. What you don’t often hear are the real challenges they face now, the true vulnerabilities that they reckon with on a daily basis.

When something bad happens we have a natural tendency to avoid bringing too much scrutiny so immediately after the event. It is “too soon.” But I believe that those moments provide the greatest learnings. The in-moment thoughts and processes are what makes first-hand experience more valuable than anything you could ever read.

I suspect that the reason we don’t hear much of the real time accounts for hard things is because there is so much uncertainty in the moment and as soon as we broadcast a tenuous idea out to the world, we’ve now committed to it no matter how many disclaimers surround the message. So instead, we have a natural editing function, a minimum level of polish that everything has.