A fence either stands or it doesn’t. A field either grows or it doesn’t. When the work is tangible, nobody has to argue about whether you did it.

A lot of white-collar work isn’t like that. The output is a decision, a direction, a relationship, a risk that didn’t happen. It’s real, but you can’t walk out and look at it. And when the work can’t speak for itself, people start listening to something else: you.

When I was nobody

When I was nobody and I was making a difference, my openness made people love me.

I said what I thought. I admitted what I didn’t know. I went out, met people, brought energy into rooms that didn’t have it. People were drawn to that. Honesty from someone with nothing to gain reads as generosity. A big personality in someone without power reads as life.

Nobody needed anything from me yet, so they could simply enjoy who I was.

When I became useful

Then I got into a position of power. Or at least one that other people felt they could use to advance their own.

Nothing about me changed. What changed was what I was worth to other people, and so how they read me.

My honesty was treated as weakness. Saying “I don’t know” or “I got that wrong” stopped sounding like candour and started sounding like an opening.

My personality was treated as immaturity. The same energy that once made a room better now made me look like I didn’t understand how serious the room was.

And every mistake became a signal that I shouldn’t go any further. Even the ones I owned out loud. Even the ones I made on purpose: sacrifices I chose so another part of the team could move forward. There’s no column for that on a scorecard. From the outside, a sacrifice and a failure look exactly the same.

I’d rather build things that can speak for me.