There is something about you that you have learned to say with an apology in front of it. Somebody taught you to.
A woman did that with me a few days ago.
We were talking about working together, and she stopped and told me that in her previous jobs, she would see what could be better and say so, and it never went well.
Then she asked if that was going to be a problem here too.
She wasn't asking. She was warning me.
I knew the sentence because I lived it.
Years ago, I was the one who raised the problem nobody wanted raised.
Not everywhere. But in several places, and that's all it takes.
I wasn't trying to be difficult. I just could not sit in a room and ignore what I knew would make the thing we were working on truly great.
And every time the temperature dropped a little. Not anger. Just that small silence where everyone waits for you to be finished.
You learn from that silence. You learn fast.
Here is what stayed with me. She is much younger than I was, and she has already learned to hand it over as a flaw.
A few workplaces taught her that this is the thing that's wrong with her, and that was enough for it to stick.
The thing she learned to apologize for is the thing greatness is made of.
Loving your idea and looking hard at where it could fail are not opposites. They are the same act.
You go looking for the holes because you care whether the thing survives contact with the real world.
Nobody ever did anything great by having an idea and then bathing in how great it is.
You get there by arguing against yourself, and by wanting the people around you to argue too.
Everything I have built came from refusing to accept that the way something has always been done is the best it can be. It usually isn't.
She won't fit everywhere. That part is true. And it says everything about those rooms and nothing about her.
In a world I feel is too comfortable with mediocrity, it saddens and worries me to think of all the people out there who are apologizing for the things in them that could make something better for everyone else.
Maybe yours isn't about work.
Are you the one who asks the extra question?
The one who takes it "too seriously"?
The one who can't let a bad answer sit?
The one who is too honest? Too direct? Too invested?
Every one of those things gets said with an apology in front of it.
Go back and look at the thing you apologize for. That's exactly what makes you rare.
