I tell my students that if they do something embarrassing (like, deep, I want to go live in the woods mortified), they should do that exact thing again soon, while the cringe is still fresh.

Your first instinct will be to do the opposite: nope, never again. But cringe is often just the heat that comes off a skill you haven’t practiced enough. The second time hurts less. The third time, you start noticing what you’d do differently, and by the fifth, you can barely remember why it felt so catastrophic. Almost everything good lives on the other side of that second try, and almost nothing lives on the other side of never again.

Most of us build our lives around fit. We spend time with people who make us feel comfortable, and say yes to things we already know we can do. Fit feels good, but it’s one of the slowest ways to grow.

Growth starts when something pushes back. Someone asks a question you can't answer, or you try something in front of people who are clearly better at it than you are. Those moments are uncomfortable, but they change you.

I think about this every time someone tells me what they're "good at" and "bad at." Most of those labels have nothing to do with ability. They're really about how many times a person was willing to be bad at something in front of other people. "I'm not good at sales" usually means someone made four calls, hated every one, and never made a fifth.

The people who come across as most themselves tend to have a long trail of small embarrassments behind them. They've asked awkward questions, and they've told jokes that got the polite half-laugh. After enough of those, discomfort stops being proof that you're bad at something and starts being the first sign you're getting better at it.

Early growth is unflattering. You're clumsy, a little exposed, and most of us would rather not be seen that way. Getting better means staying with the cringe long enough for it to turn into skill.

A Tiny Delight

I did a big hike the other day and saw some amazing scenery. When a trail is fairly flat, hiking is basically walking, which I do every day without calling it anything. What makes it different is the “hiking culture”: you're on your way there, someone's on their way back, and they tell you it's a great view, or about another hour, you're almost there. There's this camaraderie in having just a few minutes with someone. It's very much small talk, and somehow it's instantly substantive too, in a way I can't quite describe.

Until next time,

Laura

My cousins just found these photos of me and my cousins from years ago. (Can you guess which one is me?)

Look at any childhood photo of yourself and you’ll notice something strange. That kid doesn’t know she’s going to grow up to be a professor, or a writer, or a mom, or anything else she’ll become. She hasn’t heard of tenure and she has never once optimized anything. But she probably already knew something about herself, what excited her, what she was drawn to, what bored her. Things she’ll spend the next thirty years trying to remember.

That version of you had less noise. Less “you should,” less “people will think,” less career strategy, less performative self-improvement. Her intuition wasn’t stronger than yours. It just wasn’t drowned out yet.

A while back I wrote about teenage obsessions and what they might predict about your talents. This is about something even earlier, before talent entered the picture. There’s a familiar piece of advice for when you’re trying to figure out what to do with your life: think back to what you loved as a child, and let that guide you now. What made you lose track of time? What did you sit on the floor for hours doing, ignoring your name being called? And the reverse: what did you quit without a flicker of guilt?

The answers are usually specific and slightly embarrassing. You built forts out of couch cushions, or made your dolls sit through elaborate meetings you were running. You read the same book so many times you had whole pages memorized. Maybe you spent afternoons making up rules for a game only you understood.

Whatever it was, it mattered because you didn't have to be talked into it. Nothing external was rewarding you for it. You just did it, because something in you wanted to. That kid knew exactly what she liked. Not what sounds good when other people ask about it. What she actually liked.

Those answers are old data, sure, but they're clean data, collected before the noise. Most of what we call "finding yourself" in adulthood is really just noise removal. Not discovering anything new, just clearing enough space to hear what was already there. Fewer shoulds, less curating, more willingness to notice what you're drawn to before you talk yourself into or out of it. Somewhere along the way, most of us stopped being able to tell the difference between what we want and what we've been told to want.

Not all of it translates directly. You’re not going to build a career out of couch fort construction (unless you're the one who became an architect, in which case, carry on). But the shape of what pulled you then is often still the shape of what pulls you now.

The kid in the photo isn’t gone. You’ve just been talking over her.

A Tiny Delight

I read this quote recently: “Who you are at 40 is who you were at 16. You just love yourself now.” Which is another way of saying all of the above. Not that we become different people, but that the years teach us to be softer with the person we already were.

Until next time,
Laura

A very organized friend once gave me a reasonable piece of advice. Make a list of everything you do in a week, she said. Circle the things only you can do, and hand off the rest. She called it “highest and best use.”

It’s good advice, and I want to say that clearly before I start poking at it. There are probably emails someone else could answer, and meetings someone else could attend. Plenty of small tasks take longer than they should, too. Delegate them, automate them, and protect your time for the work only you can do.

But some of the least efficient parts of my week are also the parts I like most. They're not especially important on paper, and they don't produce the biggest or most visible results, but they make me feel closer to what I'm doing. So instead of asking only whether a task is a good use of my time, I've started asking whether it's a good use of my life. Those might sound like the same question, but they're not. One is about efficiency, how much you get out of an hour. The other is about meaning, whether that hour was one worth living.

For me, one of those supposedly inefficient tasks is hearing directly from people who have read something I wrote or attended one of my talks. It would be faster to have those messages sorted, summarized, and delivered to me as a list of key themes. But then I'd miss the unusual detail someone noticed, the sentence they read differently than I intended, or the story they connected to something in their own life. Those moments aren't interruptions from the work. They're part of how I understand it, and often where new ideas begin.

When we delegate too much, we sometimes remove the experiences that were helping us get better in the first place. I know a founder who still takes customer calls even though she has an excellent sales team. She doesn’t take all of them, nor should she, but she takes enough to hear where customers hesitate, and what they’re too polite to say directly. I know a leader who still spends time doing work that’s technically far below his job description, not because he can’t let go, but because it reminds him what his decisions feel like to the people who have to carry them out. These may not be the highest uses of their time, but they keep them close to the work.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should keep every task that crosses our path. Some work is simply draining. It teaches us nothing, connects us to nothing, and leaves us with less energy for what matters. That work should be handed off. It's not about resisting efficiency, it's about being more thoughtful about what we make efficient.

We usually only ask one question about a task: could someone else do this? The better one might be: what would I lose if they did? Sometimes the answer is nothing, which is useful to know. But sometimes you’d lose a source of curiosity, connection, or energy. There are things we do because no one else can, and there are things we keep doing because they make us feel most like ourselves. Both matter.

A Tiny Delight

I was in Breckenridge last week, speaking at a couple of conferences. On the drive back to the Denver airport, I took a small detour for no real reason, just a bit of extra time on my hands. And there, in an open field, was a whole herd of bison, enormous and completely unbothered. They were nearly wiped out a century ago, so seeing this many felt like a small stroke of luck. The efficient route would have saved me twenty minutes, but I'd have missed this.

Until next time,

Laura

I have a tab open right now for a beginner’s watercolor class. I bought it in the spring, opened it exactly once, and got as far as learning I’d need special paper. The tab for the special paper is also still open.

You probably have your own version of it. Open your browser right now and look at the tabs you’ve had up for weeks. That article on why octopuses have three hearts that you were definitely going to read, the twelve-hour ramen broth you were definitely going to make, or the tab left over from some 1am rabbit hole you don’t even remember starting. You’re not using any of them, but they’re still there, using a bit of you.

And it doesn't stop at the browser. There’s a longer list we all carry around in our heads: the someday tasks we feel we should get to but, if we’re honest, know we never will (like the closet you've been meaning to clean out since you moved in).

In the 1920s, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that waiters kept perfect track of complicated unpaid orders, then forgot them the instant the check was settled. She argued that our brains hold onto unfinished things far more than finished ones. Anything you leave open keeps running in the back of your mind, using up a little attention you don't even notice you're spending. It's called the Zeigarnik effect, and it's why these tabs nag at you even when you're not looking at them.

There are only two clean ways to close an open loop. You do the thing, or you admit you won’t and let it go. Both are fine, but most of us do neither. We leave them open. I’ve heard someone call these zombie tabs. Not alive, not dead, still feeding.

And feeding is the right word, because that's exactly what they do. A tab you'll never read keeps eating memory, and a task you'll never do keeps eating at your focus, plus a little pinch of guilt every time you notice it. You get none of the relief of a finished task and all of the weight of an unfinished one.

So why don't we just close them? Because closing the marathon tab feels like admitting you're lazy or that you gave up. It isn't. It means you took an honest look and finally admitted, 'I'm never going to do this,' which frees up all the attention you'd been spending to keep it open. Deleting is doing something. Ask anyone who's ever closed forty tabs at once how good it feels.

In You Already Know, I lay out an exercise for choosing between business ideas, but it works just as well on your someday list: list everything you might do, write down what actually matters to you, and cross off every item that doesn't fit, even the ones you love the idea of. When I walk people through it, they resist the crossing-off part every time, suddenly loyal to a pottery class they were never going to take. But so many of our somedays are excellent ideas that were just never excellent ideas for us, and some part of us knew it the whole time.

You don’t have to do the thing to be free of it. You just have to be honest that you won’t. An open tab you'll never click, or a someday you'll never get to, isn't a possibility you're keeping alive. It's a bill you keep paying for something you're never going to buy.

Until next time,
Laura

When JCPenney hired Ron Johnson as CEO, it looked like the safest bet in retail. This was the man who made Target “Tar-zhay,” the one who convinced designers to create exclusive collections for a discount store. Then he went to Apple and created the Apple Store experience: the Genius Bar, the open layouts, sales per square foot that became the envy of other retailers. Two home runs, in two different companies and two different industries. JCPenney was supposed to be the third.

Less than eighteen months later, he was fired. His run was called one of the biggest business failures of the 21st century.

Johnson didn't fail because he forgot what he knew, but because of what he thought he knew. Set pricing worked beautifully at Apple, so he killed JCPenney's coupons, alienating customers who lived for the thrill of the deal. Open layouts worked at Apple, so he rebuilt the stores, confusing shoppers who liked them the way they were. Everything he did at JCPenney made sense from his expert perspective. But that expertise was exactly the problem.

I tell Johnson's story in You Already Know because it captures something I call situational arrogance: the confidence we bring into situations that feel like ones we've mastered, but really aren't.

We assume that the more seasoned we get, the more we see, and the less often we're wrong. But picture your expertise as a circle. Inside the circle is what you actually know: everything you've tried, gotten wrong, fixed, and tried again. And around that circle is a border made of all the things that sit just outside what you know. Close enough to feel familiar, but new enough that you're really just guessing. When the circle grows, the border grows with it. Johnson, who reinvented retail twice, assumed retail was retail.

Expertise doesn't shrink your blind spots. It increases your confidence about things you don't know. The economist Thorstein Veblen called this the "trained incapacity" of experts: specialists are often the last to see commonsense answers, precisely because of their training. Newer research backs this up: Victor Ottati and his colleagues found that simply making people feel like experts made them noticeably more closed-minded afterward. They called it the “earned dogmatism effect.”

Beginners know they don't know, so they ask questions, double-check, move carefully. The people most at risk are the ones with the most impressive circles. The bigger the circle, the more certain they feel one step outside it.

A few ways to check

Answer the question before the information arrives. Say your prediction out loud: what do I expect this bill to be? How long do I think this will take? How do I think she’ll react? If the answer surprises you, you’ve just found the border of your expertise: a place where your sense of things is running on familiar ground.

Ask where the confidence came from. Take any opinion you hold firmly and trace it back: did I test this one, or did I inherit it from something else I'm good at? 'I'm the best salesperson on the team' is tested. 'Therefore I can run the sales team' is inherited. You can keep the inherited ones, but hold them as hypotheses.

Be suspicious when something feels easy. Real ease comes from practice. If you’ve just stepped into new territory and everything already feels obvious, what you’re feeling isn’t skill, but proximity to skill. That whisper of wait, why am I so sure? is your gut registering dissonance. Listen to it.

Keep growing the circle. Just know the trade-off: a bigger circle means more border to trip over.

Until next time,

Laura

We picture a good life as a series of big, bright moments, but a huge amount of it is actually the bad stuff that didn’t happen. The money you didn’t blow, the injury you didn’t get because you finally, grudgingly, did the warmup. The job you didn’t take, right before that whole company fell apart. We credit our good lives entirely to the things we did and overlook everything we managed not to do.

What you dodge is often worth more than what you chase, even if it never feels that way at the time. A win gets added to the pile, while a disaster can take the whole pile with it. A good chance will come around again next year. But you only have to be wiped out once, and there’s nothing left after that.

The big wins are nice when they happen, but a lot of them come down to luck and timing. You can’t make the right opportunity show up faster by wanting it more. The bad stuff works the other way. Whether you sign the lease you can’t afford, or send the text you’ll regret, is almost always up to you. You can steer away from the disaster. The win, you can only wait for.

Those saves add up over time. Give it a few decades and the person who kept clear of disasters is usually doing better than the one who chased ten big wins and got two, because they spent their attention where it actually changed something.

None of this means living with the handbrake permanently on. You still have to go after things, take real risks, and give luck a chance to find you. A life of pure defense means you never lose, but you also never play.

Still, give the things that didn’t happen some credit. Not torching your savings, not wrecking your health, not getting into that terrible argument isn’t an accident. That’s you, steering. When you’re tallying up how you’re doing, count those saves along with the wins. A good life isn’t only the great things you pulled off. It’s also the long list of bad things you made sure never happened.

A Tiny Delight

I've been trying to read more, which mostly means trying to stay off screens. It's gone well enough that I've somehow ended up in two book clubs. In one, we only read fiction and get ruthlessly judgmental about the writing (haha). In the other, we mostly read self-help books, barely discuss them, and usually drift into conversations that border on group therapy. Two different groups of friends, both a lot of fun, and really just a good excuse to get together. The book is almost beside the point.

Until next time,

Laura

I once spent two years slowly killing a houseplant, then moved it three feet to a brighter window and watched it turn green again. The only thing I’d changed was where it stood.

We’re oddly generous with plants. When one struggles, nobody calls it lazy or says it isn’t trying hard enough. We say it needs more light, or different soil, or a bigger pot, and we change the conditions. But when a person struggles, the first place we look is inward. We assume the problem is our effort, our discipline, or our character. We almost never stop to ask whether we’ve just been planted in the wrong spot.

Where you are matters about as much as how hard you try. You can be talented, driven, and fully yourself and still wilt, not because anything is wrong with you, but because the soil can’t feed what you’re trying to grow.

Bad soil doesn’t look like a disaster. It shows up in little ways: the team where your best ideas go nowhere, the company that rewards a way of working that just isn’t yours, or the relationship where the parts of you that used to feel like strengths suddenly feel like something to hide. It’s the kind of thing that has you spending all your energy trying to fit the place instead of growing in it.

And the same quality can be worth completely different things depending on where you are. The intensity that wears one team out is the exact thing another would be thrilled to have. The place you’re in decides what it’s worth.

In You Already Know, I tell the story of a Harvard professor named Philip Stone. He spent one sabbatical year teaching at a small college most of his colleagues had never heard of, and it turned out to be the best year of his working life. He felt awake in a way he never had at Harvard. When the college asked him to stay, he wanted to say yes. But he was a tenured Harvard professor, and he couldn’t get past what people would think. So he went back, and he never took another sabbatical. Years later, near the end of his life, he admitted that one of his biggest regrets was not staying. He’d found his soil and talked himself out of it, because the fancier pot was supposed to be the right one.

Now “it’s the soil” can turn into a story you tell yourself to avoid ever looking in the mirror. Sometimes the thing holding you back really is something you need to work on, and moving somewhere new just means you drag the same problem along with you. If you keep hitting the same wall in wildly different places, that’s probably a you thing, not a soil thing. But if you’re doing fine everywhere except here, it’s not a character flaw, it’s a location problem.

So before you decide you’re the problem, take a good look at the ground you’re standing in. Ask whether your best qualities are being fed or starved. Some of the most capable people I know spent years convinced they were failing, when really they were doing a heroic job of surviving conditions that were never going to let them grow. Often the bravest, most practical thing you can do isn’t to try harder where you are. It’s to go find better soil.

A Tiny Delight

We have a lot of plants. We live in Boston, where winter runs about nine months if you’re being honest, so for most of the year they all migrate indoors and our living room turns into something between a greenhouse and a rainforest. Guests always have questions. Now that it’s finally warm, the plants are back outside and our house looks normal again.

My favorite is the one we can't seem to stop. My mother-in-law calls it a "mother-in-law's tongue" plant, which is apparently a real nickname. We started with two. Through some very low-effort propagating, we somehow now have more than twenty. Turns out that in the right spot, some things don't just grow, they take over.

Until next time,

Laura

A student sat in my office recently. "Everyone here is the best at something," she said. "The best coder, the best presenter, the best at finance. I'm just... pretty good at a bunch of things."

She's hardly the first. This worry walks into my office every year. Students look around, see classmates with one clear, shiny talent, and feel like a collection of pretty-goods.

Well, the "best" category is a packed ranking — there's exactly one winner and a long line behind them. The "only" category has no competitors at all.

The people who create a real edge for themselves are rarely the best at the headline skill (the one the job posting is named after). They’re the ones who combine two or three things that don’t usually show up in the same person. Any one of those things, on its own, might be unremarkable. Put them together in one person, though, and they become unusually hard to find.

Being very good at one thing is common, actually. Whatever your field, there are plenty of people in it who are very good. If your plan is to out-climb all of them on the exact ladder everyone else is already on, you’ve signed up for a very crowded race. And look: if you’re truly on track to be the best at one thing, keep climbing. This post is for everyone else.

So what do the rest of us do? Add a second strength, and watch what happens. Companies aren’t hunting for the best engineer. They’re hunting for the engineer who can also stand up and explain the thing to customers without putting everyone to sleep. That person is rarer. Sometimes, in a particular place at a particular time, that person is the only one.

You don’t have to be a ten out of ten at anything to become the only option. You just have to be the only one carrying a specific combination. Two sevens that rarely live in the same person will beat a lone nine almost every time.

There's a name for this: skill stacking — building your advantage by deliberately layering several good-not-great skills instead of chasing mastery of one. Each new skill multiplies the value of the ones underneath it, and with every layer, the stack gets rarer. The talent isn't any single skill, it's the stack.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a good rapper by hip-hop standards and a good composer by Broadway standards (and arguably not the best at either). But the Venn diagram of people fluent in both was a population of roughly one. Hamilton lives in that overlap. There were better rappers and better composers. There just wasn't anyone else where the two met.

In Edge, I talk about basic goods. These aren't just your talents in the résumé sense. They're the full bundle of what you bring: the pieces of your story, the detours, the odd skills, the things you picked up because of where you came from rather than what you were formally trained to do. That's usually where your edge is hiding. So don't edit out the parts that don't quite fit the résumé: the weird hobby, the unrelated job you once had, the background that feels too far from the core of the work. Those off-to-the-side strengths are often what make your combination yours. They make you harder to compare, which is exactly what you want. People can rank a skill, but they have a much harder time ranking a combination.

How to find your own combination

Start by listing the things you’re merely good at. Be generous, maybe even a little shameless, about it. Write down two or three things you’re honestly a seven out of ten at, including the ones that feel random or off to the side. Then look for the pairs that strengthen each other, where one skill makes the other more useful. Where are both of those things needed at the same time? That intersection is where your edge starts to show up. Neither skill has to be extraordinary on its own — the pairing is what's hard to find.

Build the thing that only you, with your particular, slightly strange mix of skills and history, could put together. You could be the best. But you could also be the only.

A tiny delight

I've started learning Italian. On a flight the other day, I watched a movie called Solo Mio, set in Rome. The plot was predictable from the opening scene, but it didn't matter. The whole time, Italian was streaming by in the background, and I kept catching words I actually knew. Learning a language can start to feel banal somewhere around the four-hundredth flashcard, so this gave it a small boost of fun. A so-so movie plus a half-learned language, two okay things on their own. Stacked together, a genuinely lovely two hours. Apparently it works on delights, too.

Until next time,

Laura

This month, I’m going to start working out. I’m going to learn Italian, read more, sleep better, eat cleaner.

You know the list. It’s the classic “new version of me” checklist. Ambitious and organized, very January-energy (even if it’s May). But there’s usually something missing from these lists: the one habit that’s draining the life out of everything else you’re trying to build.

Stopping your worst habit will change your life faster than starting your best one. Fix the leak before you fill the bucket.

Picture a bucket with a hole in the side, an inch from the bottom. You can pour water into it all day, faster, cleaner, fancier water if you like. It doesn’t matter. The water still settles at one inch, because the bucket’s capacity isn’t determined by how much you pour in, but by where the leak is. The leak becomes the ceiling.

That’s how most of us live. We’ve got leaky buckets, and instead of fixing them, we keep adding more water. A healthier morning routine is lovely, but it can’t do much if you’re still scrolling until 1 a.m. Most of the gains simply drain out the side.

So why do we keep adding instead of subtracting? Two reasons, I think.

First, adding is visible, and subtraction isn’t. You can post the gym selfie or the stack of books, but you can’t show the late-night snack you didn’t wander into the kitchen for, the doom-scroll you didn’t open, the impulse you didn’t follow. There’s no progress photo for restraint, no visible trace of a habit you removed.

Second, “I am becoming” feels better than “I am stopping.” One sounds like ambition, the other sounds like limitation, maybe even stagnation. We like to imagine growth as addition: more routines, more goals, more effort. Nobody writes a memoir called Everything I Didn’t Do.

Most of the time, the biggest gains don’t come from what you add. They come from what you remove. Stop the late-night scroll and your sleep improves, your mornings open up, your energy rises. And you didn’t add a single thing. You just stopped pouring out the side.

So before you add another good habit to the list, find the leak that’s undoing your effort. Patch that first. Then, by all means, fill the bucket.

A Tiny Delight

A follow-up on Jamie Ding, the Jeopardy contestant I told you about a while back. There’s been a small parade of articles about him since his run, and almost none of them are about the trivia. They’re about how nice and thoughtful he is, and how kind he was to the contestants standing next to him.

There's something hopeful about seeing people rally around someone simply for being a good person. We complain a lot, often correctly, about what gets attention these days. Here’s a tiny piece of evidence in the other direction. I’ll take it.

Until next time,

Laura

Historically, the role of a professor was pretty simple: your professor knew things you didn’t, and you paid to sit in the classroom until you knew them too. Or at least, that was the story we told ourselves. Of course, the best professors were always doing more than delivering content. They were mentors, advisors, and guides, helping students navigate not just what to learn, but how to think, what to pursue, and how to apply it.

That trade is shifting fast. A student can now pull up a decent explanation of almost anything I teach in three seconds. Not perfect, and not always deep, but good enough to make one thing obvious: if my only job is to deliver information, I am in trouble.

And it’s not just content delivery. The surface layer of mentorship is also widely available now. Generic career advice, interview prep, “what should I major in.” There’s an AI for all of that, and it’s pretty good. So the question becomes: what am I actually doing up there?

One useful way to think about this is that AI has dramatically lowered the cost of prediction: generating answers, summaries, explanations, and recommendations. But when prediction becomes cheaper, judgment becomes more valuable. Someone still has to decide what matters, what to trust, what to ignore, and what action to stand behind.

Will Drover and I made a related point in a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article. AI is not simply sweeping in and replacing whole jobs overnight. It is creeping in task by task, reshaping some parts of work while leaving others stubbornly human. The places where AI slows down are the places where judgment, relational depth, human assurance, trust, and accountability still matter.

Teaching sits right in that zone. AI can already summarize readings, draft assignments, generate explanations, and provide basic feedback. It can handle the surface layer of advice, too. Some parts of teaching are moving into what we call the ‘assist’ and ‘reshape’ stages, and that will change the work.

But the heart of teaching was never just content delivery. AI cannot yet motivate a student who has checked out, it cannot read a room, or manage the social dynamics of a classroom. It cannot look a student in the eye and say, “That sounds plausible, but do you actually believe it?” And it cannot create the kind of conviction that comes from defending a point of view in front of other people who push back.

So the classroom I walk into today is not a place where students come to collect facts, but a place where they come to build judgment. Where they’re put in uncomfortable spots, where they have to argue for a recommendation, commit to a point of view, and stress-test it.

I tell my students that the same shift is coming for their own careers. The scarce skill will not be knowing the answer, but knowing which answer matters, and making a call when the information is incomplete—which, in the real world, it always is. The students who can sit across from a founder, a board, a patient, a customer, or a team and make a judgment the model cannot make for them are going to do fine. The ones trying to out-memorize the machines are not.

And maybe none of this is actually new. The best teachers were always building judgment. AI did not change that. It just made it impossible to keep pretending that delivering information was enough.

A Tiny Delight

It's finally starting to feel like spring in Boston... I'm not from here, and when I moved a few years ago, I expected to brace myself for the winters. Those who don't live here think of the cold first, and the cold is serious. But Boston is not the kind of city that goes inside and waits it out. People just bundle up and keep going. You see runners along the Charles in February, training for a marathon that's still months away. This city moves through the cold instead of around it. And when spring finally arrives, it's delightful. I really wasn't expecting to love it here this much.

Until next time,

Laura

Some decisions don’t get easier the longer you stare at them. Should we have a kid? Should I take the job in another city? Should I leave the career I spent fifteen years building? You can sit with the pros-and-cons list, or call a smart friend, but none of it quite settles the question. Because the person who’d actually live with the answer doesn’t exist yet.

In You Already Know, I write that intuition is an entire process: your past experiences, your pattern recognition, your body, your environment, all working together until they form a signal you can trust. Gut feel works because it draws on data you’ve collected along the way: what you’ve lived through, sensed, and stored away, even when you didn’t realize you were doing it.

But what about decisions you’ve never faced in quite this form before? In those moments, your intuition may not have direct experience to rely on, but it still has traces it can follow. A flicker of energy when you imagine one path, or a small heaviness when you picture the other. A pull toward one option that doesn’t quite have words yet. That pull is still information, just a different kind. Your body may sense something before your brain can explain it, and often, that something is the version of you that you’re reaching for.

For these kinds of decisions, there may not be an objectively correct answer waiting to be discovered. Gut feel can’t tell you which life will be “better,” but it can help you recognize which one feels more yours. The you who has the kid, or the you who doesn’t? The you who stays, or the you who moves? The you who keeps building the career, or the you who starts over?

Whatever you choose, the choice won’t become a life on its own. You’ll have to build around it, adjust as you go, and learn what needs changing. It’s the action afterward that turns a decision into a life. It also trains your intuition along the way, giving it more lived experience to draw from next time you find yourself standing at a fork in the road.

Still, even after you’ve built a good life, you may occasionally wonder about the one you didn’t choose. There will be a Tuesday afternoon, ten years from now, when you’ll look up and think, huh, what would it have been like if I’d… That wondering isn’t a sign you chose wrong, but that you’re human. The other version of you is just a ghost. The one you’re living with is the only one who’s real, and worth your attention now.

A Tiny Delight: A Tribute to Jamie Ding

He's a Jeopardy contestant who ended a 31-game winning streak on Monday night, becoming one of the show's all-time top earners. I had been rooting for him for weeks, and was deeply emotionally invested in his run. Beyond being brilliant, he is the kind of person you watch on TV and think, oh, what a lovely human. Open-minded, friendly, pleasant in a way you could feel through the screen. Watching a really nice person succeed at something hard is weirdly hopeful. So is watching him lose with that much grace. Look him up if you missed it. The world needs more Jamie Dings.

Until next time,

Laura

A few weeks ago, I came across a quote from Cate Hall, a former lawyer turned professional poker player:

“Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what is reasonable are accurate. Of course, try not to be a jerk in the process. If you are only asking for things you get, you are not aiming high enough.”

This challenges the assumption that we already know what’s reasonable to want. And that gap between what we think is reasonable and what actually is, is where a lot of us leave opportunity on the table.

Reasonableness is not a fixed line, it’s a feeling. And feelings can be shaped by all sorts of things that have nothing to do with what’s actually possible. Your upbringing, your industry, or the last five conversations you had. Whether the voice in your head says don’t be greedy or go big or go home. Most of us build our sense of what’s okay to ask for based on what we’ve seen other people ask for. Which means your ceiling might just be a reflection of someone else’s comfort zone.

In You Already Know, I talk about how our gut feel comes from an intuiting process — one that’s been drawing on our experiences and the data around us long before we can consciously explain it. Your intuition is powerful, but it’s also trainable. It updates based on what you feed it. And if you’ve only ever asked for things within a narrow, “safe” range, your intuition starts to treat that range as the whole world.

Asking for the unreasonable isn’t reckless. It’s a way of checking your assumptions. You’re testing whether the door you never tried is actually locked, or just closed.

I love that this comes from a poker player. Poker is basically a masterclass in reading situations, managing risk, and making decisions when you don’t have all the information. If you only bet when you have a perfect hand, you’ll win small and lose slowly. The best players know that betting bigger, at the right time, with imperfect information, is how you learn what the table will actually give you. No, no. You’re not throwing money away. You’re buying data. Expensive data, sometimes, but data.

Asking for something that feels unreasonable works the same way. You’re gathering information, not being reckless. Even when the answer is no, you learn something. You learn where the real boundary is, how people respond, and what to ask for next time. Every answer, yes or no, means your gut is working with better data going forward.

Ask for the extra time, the introduction, the meeting with the person who seems “too important” to email. Go slightly beyond what you think is reasonable and see what happens. You won’t always get a yes, but you will always survive the no. I have yet to meet someone who was permanently harmed by a polite email. And over time, you’ll end up with a bigger, more interesting life than if you only asked for things you were sure you’d get.

I like that Cate Hall adds “try not to be a jerk in the process.” Asking for the unreasonable is not the same as demanding it. Don’t be entitled, be curious. Don’t say “I deserve this,” say “I wonder if this is possible.” Delivered with respect, that is disarming, and people respond to it. They might say no, but they rarely resent the ask when it comes from genuine interest rather than entitlement.

Edge Thought of the Week

The next time you catch yourself thinking that’s too much to ask for, ask anyway. You don’t learn the size of the game by folding every hand. At some point, you have to put something on the table and see what comes back. And if you never test your intuition about what’s reasonable, you’ll never know how much room there actually was.

Until next time,

Laura

People are always learning how to treat you. Not from what you say, but from what you accept.

When you let a missed deadline slide without a word, you're teaching someone that deadlines with you are flexible. When you laugh off a dismissive comment in a meeting, you're teaching the room that dismissing you is low-risk. And when you say 'it's fine' when it's not fine, that's a data point too.

None of these are catastrophic on their own, but they accumulate. And over time, what you tolerate becomes what people expect from you… and what they tell others to expect too.

I write about the concept of Guide in Edge: the idea that you can actively shape how others perceive you. You don’t have to wait for people to “see the real you.” You can guide their perceptions through deliberate signals. But guiding isn’t just about what you project. It’s also about what you permit. You can't signal that your time is valuable if you consistently accept it being wasted. The things you allow into your life are as much a part of your brand as the things you put out into the world.

Think of it this way: your stated standards are what you say you expect. Your revealed standards are what you actually accept, and people pay far more attention to the second one.

This isn't about becoming someone who picks a fight over every small thing. That's exhausting for everyone, and it creates a whole different problem. It’s about noticing the gap between what you want people to understand about you and what your behavior is actually teaching them. Sometimes that gap is tiny, but sometimes it's been growing in the background for years, and you’ve been so focused on being agreeable that you didn’t realize it was becoming your whole identity.

The correction doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be as simple as: “I want to circle back to that deadline… can we talk about what happened?” Or: “I want to make sure I finish my point.” Or even just a pause, a beat of silence instead of an automatic “it’s fine.” Small recalibrations, repeated over time, is how you retrain people without blowing anything up.

Edge Thought of the Week

Is there something you’ve been absorbing because it felt easier than addressing it? Maybe at work, maybe in a relationship, maybe in how someone speaks to you. Ask yourself: what is this teaching people about what I'll accept?

Think about how you can close that gap, calmly, directly, without drama. Don't explode or send a strongly worded email at midnight. A single sentence is usually enough. That's not confrontation, that's calibration, and it's one of the most underrated ways to guide how people see you.

A Tiny Delight

A Bon Jovi song came on this week. I grew up in New Jersey but haven't been back since I was 17. Didn't matter, three seconds in and I was there. People say old songs get stuck in your head. But I don't think stuck is the right word. Some songs never leave. They just go still for a while and wait.

Until next time,

Laura

A few years ago, I had lunch with a friend — another academic — and she casually mentioned she was writing a children’s book. Not a picture book about feelings. A chapter book about game theory. For eight-year-olds. I remember thinking: Wait. You can do that?

She wasn’t framing it as a “side project” or acting as though it needed justification for it being outside her lane. She just... was doing it. And something about the casualness of it rewired my sense of what was available to me. I walked away from that lunch thinking differently about my own work, because she expanded my map of what was possible.

I’ve started calling these people bravery friends.

Not All Support Looks the Same

We talk a lot about the importance of having a support system. And support matters — deeply. But I think we underestimate how much the type of support matters.

I wrote before about Dunbar's number — the idea that we can only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships, and that those relationships break down into tiers based on closeness. But what I didn't get into is that it's not just about closeness. It's also about function.

Some friends are for comfort. They’re the ones who show up when things fall apart, who listen without judging, who tell you it’s going to be okay. You need them. Some friends are for honesty. They tell you the thing you don’t want to hear. They push back on your bad ideas. You need them too.

But bravery friends are different. They don’t comfort you or correct you. They expand you. They casually mention something ambitious they’re doing — starting a company, writing a book in a genre they have no business being in, pitching an idea that sounds slightly crazy — and suddenly your own ceiling moves. They didn’t tell you to aim higher. But they showed you, without trying, that the ceiling was never where you thought it was.

And of course, sometimes the same person can be all of these things at different moments. Most of our closest friends are.

Bravery Is Contagious

What’s interesting about bravery friends is that the effect is almost never the result of a big, dramatic conversation. It’s not a motivational speech over drinks. It’s usually an offhand comment. Something like “I just applied for this thing, probably won’t get it, but why not.” A story about something they tried that didn’t work, told with a shrug.

What they're really doing — without meaning to — is making the scary thing look doable. Or at least attempt-able. A dozen conversations with people who tell you “you’re amazing, you’ve got this” won’t shift your trajectory the way one lunch with someone who’s doing something that makes you think, oh — I didn’t realize that was an option.

Think about the people in your life. Not just the ones who support you — the ones who expand you. The ones you walk away from feeling like the world got a little bigger. Who are they? Invest in those relationships. They're not more important than your comfort friends or your honesty friends. But they serve a function nothing else can replicate. They make you braver by proximity.

Edge Thought of the Week

When was the last time someone made you think, “Wait. I could do that too?” Reach out to that person this week and tell them that their ambition expanded yours. It takes thirty seconds and it’ll make their day. People almost never hear that watching them was what made it feel possible.

A Tiny Delight

I recently went to my daughter’s fractal fair, which was one of those school events that turns out to be far more interesting than you expect. It was equal parts math, art, and children explaining infinity with absolute confidence. I went in not entirely sure what a fractal was, and left genuinely delighted. There’s something wonderful about seeing children get their hands on an abstract idea and make it feel concrete, playful, and alive. Adults tend to treat complexity like something to be intimidated by. Kids just start coloring.

Until next time,

Laura

There’s a concept I like teaching called bricolage. It’s a French word, and whenever I say it in class, I get a sea of blank faces. So I always explain it the same way: Have you ever seen MacGyver?

For those who haven’t​, and I forgive my twenty-something students for this, MacGyver is a brilliant mastermind who gets called in to save the world. At some point in every episode, there’s a ticking clock and a problem that seems impossible. He looks around the room, grabs whatever happens to be nearby, maybe a paperclip, a rubber band, a glass of wine, and somehow turns it into something that defuses the bomb in the final thirty seconds. That’s bricolage. It simply means building with whatever you already have, reassembling existing pieces into something new.

Entrepreneurship researchers Ted Baker and Reed E. Nelson studied this idea and found something interesting. The most resourceful founders don’t succeed because they have more resources. They succeed because they recombine what they already have in ways other people didn’t see. A skill from a previous career. A relationship from a completely different context. Leftover materials from another project. Nothing new on its own, but combined in a way no one expected.

But bricolage isn’t just an entrepreneurship concept. It’s how creativity actually works across almost every domain. The most creative people aren’t inventing things from scratch. They’re recombining pieces that already exist. And the people who recombine best aren’t necessarily the ones with the most natural talent. They’re the ones who’ve gotten very good at taking things apart.

Think about the most creative person you know. The one who consistently comes up with ideas that make you think, how did they see that? Chances are, that person isn’t sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. They’re an obsessive reverse engineer. They eat at a restaurant and leave having noticed why the experience felt so cohesive: the lighting, the pacing, the server who anticipated what the table needed before anyone asked. Most people just had dinner. They were doing fieldwork. Creative people aren’t passive consumers of the world. They’re active dismantlers. They pull things apart in their minds to see the architecture underneath.

One of the most persistent myths about creativity is that it’s about talent. That some people simply have the ability to generate original ideas and others don’t. But creativity is much less mysterious than that. It’s about building a habit of deconstructing. And the more things you take apart, the more building blocks you start to see everywhere. And once you see the pieces, recombining them becomes surprisingly natural.

Heston Blumenthal is one of the world's most celebrated chefs, but some of his most famous dishes didn't come from other kitchens. They came from neuroscience papers, psychology labs, and research on how sound affects taste perception. His signature dish "Sound of the Sea" — seafood served alongside an iPod in a conch shell playing ocean waves — came from his obsession with how memory and the senses interact. He wasn't borrowing from the pantry. He was borrowing from fields that had nothing to do with food, and recombining what he found into something no other chef had imagined.

Creativity isn’t about pulling something out of thin air. It’s bricolage: the habit of reverse engineering the world around you, understanding how the pieces fit together, and then remixing them into something new.

Edge Thought of the Week

“Creativity is just connecting things.” — Steve Jobs

Next time something impresses you, spend five minutes asking: Why did it work? How was it built?

The moment you start asking those questions, the world changes a little. It stops being something you consume and starts being something you can take apart and build from.

A Tiny Delight

A recent delight: cauliflower. Yes, really. I learned it was supposedly a “superfood,” which, I’ll admit, usually makes me slightly suspicious. But I started experimenting with it anyway, trying different ways to cook it, and it turns out cauliflower can take on bold flavors (like it’s been waiting its whole life for better branding). The most recent version was kung pao cauliflower, which sounds like something that should not work nearly as well as it does. And yet, it was excellent. A little reminder not to underestimate the plain things. Some of them are just waiting for the right sauce.

Until next time,

Laura

A few days ago, I found a photo on my phone taken many years ago, on a random weekday. Nothing special—just me on the couch, my son asleep on my lap, a paper in my hand I was trying to finish, Huggies boxes and scattered toys filling the background. I remember that time vividly. I was stressed about an R&R, behind on a paper, running on whatever sleep a newborn allows, and carving out work time wherever I could find it.

​​At the time, it felt like just another Tuesday I was trying to survive. Looking at that photo now? It’s one of the happiest pictures I own.

Nothing magical happened that day. But I can see, with the clarity that only distance provides, that I was in it. Right in the thick of it. My kids were small, the house was loud, I was tired and alive. And I had absolutely no idea those were the good old days.

I think about this a lot, because it keeps happening. Every stage of life that felt like “just getting through it” eventually becomes the era I look back on with a strange fondness. The chaos of early parenthood. The uncertainty of being a young professor. Even the anxious, broke years of graduate school—which at the time felt like an endurance test—now glow with a warmth I didn’t feel while I was living them.

Which raises the question: What if the good old days are happening right now, and we’re just too busy surviving them to notice?

The Nostalgia Trap (and Its Opposite)

There’s a well-documented psychological phenomenon called rosy retrospection—the tendency to remember the past more favorably than we experienced it. We leave out the stress, the boredom, the frustration—and keep only the highlights. That’s why your college years seem magical in memory even though at the time you were eating ramen at midnight and stressing about finals.

But we don’t just romanticize the past. We also systematically undervalue the present. Psychologists call this the end-of-history illusion—the belief that who we are right now is the “finished” version of ourselves. We look back and can clearly see how much we’ve changed, but when we look at today, we assume this is more or less it.

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert and colleagues, who coined the term, put it this way: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” Their research found that people at every age—from 18 to 68—underestimate how much they’ll change in the next decade.

So we end up in this odd position: too busy to appreciate what’s happening right now, and not yet far enough away to see it clearly. We’re living in a photograph we won’t value for another ten years.

Catching the Good Old Days in Real Time

At 22, you feel behind. At 35, you feel late. At 50, you feel like you “should have.” And yet, whatever age you are today, your future self would love to be it.

I’m not going to tell you to “be more grateful” or “practice mindfulness.” You’ve heard that. Everyone’s heard that. Instead, I want to offer a different angle. A question you can ask yourself once a week, or even once a month: What am I taking for granted right now that I’ll miss in ten years? Instead of forcing gratitude, this question nudges you into awareness.

Maybe the answer is your energy, your curiosity, your friendships, your body’s particular capacity right now, or your ability to still start something over from scratch. The fact that your parents are still around to call. The freedom of not yet having kids, or the chaos of having them. The side project you work on at 10 p.m. because you still have the will and the hours to do it. (And yes, eventually the knees. That one becomes relevant sooner than you’d think.)

What I’ve found, both personally and in conversations with people reflecting on earlier chapters of their lives, is that nobody’s future self says “I wish you’d spent more time comparing yourself sideways, to peers and benchmarks.” Or “You really should have worried more.” The regrets are almost always about the opposite—not seeing what was already there. Not squeezing the life out of the days that, in hindsight, had everything they were looking for.

In Edge, I write about how our advantage isn’t determined by our situation—it’s determined by how we play the hand we’re dealt. The same is true with time. Every age is underrated by the person living it.

Thirty-seven isn’t "too old to start over"—it's the sweet spot where you know enough to skip the rookie mistakes but you're still hungry enough to take the leap. Forty-five isn’t “past your prime”—it’s when you finally know what’s worth your energy and what isn’t. Twenty-four isn’t “too young to be taken seriously”—it’s when nobody’s watching closely yet, which means you can mess up, figure it out, and try again without it costing you much.

The job that feels too small, the city that feels temporary, the in-between that feels like treading water —none of these are placeholders. They’re the raw material. And you are in possession of something rare: this particular intersection of time, energy, and possibility. That combination will never exist in exactly this way again.

The point isn’t to freeze the moment. It’s to see it while you’re in it. Because the tragedy isn’t that good things end, it’s that we were there and didn’t know it.

Edge Thought of the Week

Imagine you’re 80 years old. You get one hour to come back and inhabit your current life—your current body, your current calendar, your current set of choices. What would you do in that hour? Who would you call? What would you start? What would you stop postponing?

Your future self is wishing for today. Because the good old days rarely announce themselves. They just show up dressed as an ordinary Tuesday.

One more thing before you go. I’m going to start ending these posts with A Tiny Delight, a small field note from the week. It’ll be one thing I enjoyed, something I’m reading, listening to, or noticing in the world. I’m sharing it because it’s often the small things that sharpen how we see the big ones.

If you like it, tell me. If you hate it, also tell me. I can take it.

A Tiny Delight

I just finished The Correspondent by Virginia Evans — and loved it. It came to me in an unexpected way: someone I hadn’t spoken to in years reached out of nowhere to recommend it, and the reconnection ended up being as moving as the book itself. Which feels fitting, given what the book is about.

Until next time,

Laura

Every semester, I watch students pull up their calendars and see a mosaic of brightly colored blocks. Club meetings. Case competitions. Coffee chats. Volunteer shifts. Something called Future Leaders of Future Leadership (which is exhausting just to read). And almost inevitably, someone stares at it all and says, “I think I’m falling behind.” I usually say, “You’re not falling behind. You’re just in your Sailing state right now.”

A career runs on two states of mind: Sailing and Anchoring. In the Sailing state, you say yes to a lot of things, you sample widely, and collect real data about yourself. In the Anchoring state, you say no more often and protect your attention, so you can do a few things exceptionally well. Growth needs both exploration and focus. The mistake isn’t being in one state or the other, it’s staying in the wrong one for too long.

The Sailing state: not chaos, research

This is the state where you take the internship that’s not quite your thing, join the committee you’re mildly curious about, say yes to the project that mysteriously spreads into every open inch of your calendar. People love to call this “being unfocused.” I call it “building priors,” or collecting data. You can’t know what fits until you’ve worn a few things that don’t. Most people don’t lack talent. They just lack data about what actually works for them, and data requires exposure.

Sailing isn’t “say yes to everything forever.” It means you say yes for now, and you pay attention. After each new experience, ask yourself these three questions:
1. Did this give you energy or drain you?
2. Did you learn anything, or did you just stay busy?
3. Did you feel like you, or like you were playing a part? (You can be “successful” and still feel like you’re playing a role written by someone who doesn’t know you very well.)

In the Sailing state, you’re not looking for your passion (that word comes with too much pressure). You’re looking for your repeatable yes—the kind of work you’d happily do again even if it doesn’t sound impressive at dinner.

Repeatable yeses show up as patterns, not lightning bolts. You’ll notice you keep being the person who translates complicated ideas into simple ones, or you’re weirdly energized by negotiating with difficult stakeholders (I have questions, and can I introduce you to academia?). Sailing is how you find those patterns. You don’t discover what you’re good at by staying perfectly still. You learn by moving, adjusting, noticing what pulls you forward, and what makes you feel a little seasick.

The Anchoring state: building depth

The Anchoring state is when you start protecting your time. You get more selective so you can become really good at a few things instead of decent at everything. You’re not collecting experiences anymore, you’re building strength.

In You Already Know, I share a metaphor I use with students: you get one little paper cup to fill in this chapter of life, and there are faucets everywhere, pouring out opportunities. Every faucet is something you could say yes to. If you try to catch everything, you end up with a soggy mess and an empty cup. The only way to leave with a full cup is to turn most faucets into a drip. Anchoring isn’t deprivation, it’s curation.

It means choosing fewer things and giving them more time. That’s when a career starts to build real momentum. You’re not constantly starting over, trying to prove yourself in a new context every few months. Your skills start to carry over, and people start to understand what you’re about. And instead of collecting just contacts, you start finding people you can actually build with.

One important note: these states repeat

People sometimes hear this and assume sailing is for your early twenties and anchoring is what “serious adults” do. I wish. Careers don’t work like a straight staircase. They’re more like a coastline. You can be in a Sailing state at 22, anchor at 27, sail again at 35, anchor again at 41. You shift back into sailing when your world changes, a new job, a promotion, a life shift, a new technology that rearranges the rules, or even the realization that you’re succeeding at something you don’t actually want.

A practical way to do this, without turning your whole life into open water, is to anchor the core and sail at the edges. Keep one sturdy thing where you’re making steady progress: a craft, a field, a community. Then let yourself explore in smaller, safer ways around it. Take on a side project, try an experiment, pick up a new problem to play with for a few weeks. You get the learning of Sailing without the drifting.

Two traps to watch for:

1) Permanent sailing

This is when “keeping options open” turns into fear of committing. You’re not exploring anymore, you’re avoiding the discomfort of choosing. It often sounds like: “I’m still figuring it out.” But the feeling underneath is usually anxiety: “If I choose, I might choose wrong.” A good clue you’re here is that your yeses don’t energize you anymore. They feel like busywork—stuff you do so you don’t have to choose.

2) Premature anchoring
This is when you specialize too early because it looks “responsible.” If you haven’t tried enough to know what actually fits, you can end up defending a path you never really chose. A good clue you’re here is that your noes aren’t creating depth, they’re just helping you feel safer.

So when do you switch?

You move from Sailing to Anchoring when you can honestly say: “I know what deserves my best time right now.” Not forever or as your whole identity. Just for now.

And you’ll know you’re ready because your yeses start to feel repetitive, and your noes start to feel like relief. That relief is data, too. It’s your inner compass telling you, “Okay, we have enough information. Time to anchor.”

Sailing gives you information. Anchoring gives you momentum. The goal isn’t to pick one state for life. It’s to notice which one you’re in, and act accordingly.

Until next time,

Laura

Have you noticed how easy it is to build rock-solid arguments for why not to begin something?

Your mind can make a compelling case for almost anything. But action does something your best reasoning can’t: it creates evidence. And in the end, life tends to respond more to what you’ve actually done than what you could explain in theory.

Most people picture procrastination as doomscrolling, snacking, or reorganizing a sock drawer. Sometimes, yes. But among high-achievers, procrastination often shows up as research, frameworks, “just one more conversation”, “building the plan”, or drafting the perfect announcement post for the thing you haven’t done yet. Most of the time, it’s a way of trying to buy certainty.

The problem is, certainty doesn’t come before action. It’s often the result of action. You don’t get clarity by thinking harder in the same spot. You get it by doing something that gives you information you didn’t have before.

That’s how people get stuck. They can see too many angles. They can forecast the risks, anticipate objections, and picture the awkward email reply. They can also argue convincingly that they need more time, more data, more credentials, more clarity. And to be fair, those arguments are often solid. They’re just not useful.

Life rewards momentum more than perfect reasoning. When you’re moving, you can course-correct. You meet people you wouldn’t have met, find problems you didn’t know existed, and get feedback that re-routes you.

In You Already Know, I talk about gut feel as the outcome of an intuition process that’s been quietly collecting patterns long before you can explain them. But gut feel only gets sharper with feedback, and feedback requires contact with reality. Action is that contact. A small experiment, a simple email, a rough draft, the conversation you’re slightly nervous to have, these aren’t just steps forward. They’re data. They teach your intuition what it picked up correctly, what it overread, and what it missed entirely. Without that loop, your mind stays busy building arguments, and your gut feel never gets the chance to calibrate.

You can think of it this way: planning helps you predict, action helps you learn. And learning beats predicting almost every time, especially early on. That’s why the simplest move is usually the best one: just start.

And yes, it can feel unfair that the world doesn’t reward the quality of your thoughts. But it also means you don’t need to be the person who feels the most ready in the room to move forward. You need to be the person willing to test, adjust, and keep going.

Good ideas matter, of course. But without action, they can stay trapped as potential, and potential is comfortable because it lets you feel capable without risking anything. Over time, the people who move, even in small ways, tend to go further than the people who stay in planning mode.

So if you’re waiting to feel ready, you might be waiting for the wrong thing. Take one small step, even if it’s imperfect, and let that next step teach you what you couldn’t think your way into.

Until next time,

Laura

When people underestimate you, you gain something that people with a reputation to protect spend years trying to earn: freedom. You’re less boxed in by expectations, which gives you room to experiment. You can try things before you have them fully figured out, mess up, adjust, and keep going. In a strange way, being underestimated can become a real advantage because it lowers the cost of trying.

High expectations tend to do the opposite. They create pressure to be consistent, to look competent, and to protect the identity you worked hard to earn. You turn into the honor student who won’t take the class that might dent the GPA. You start making choices that keep the image intact, instead of choices that help you grow.

Being underestimated can feel like permission to run experiments. Mistakes don’t feel as expensive, so you can make more of them. You collect feedback and data. You try more, you learn more, you get better faster.

And experiments are naturally high variance: plenty of okay outcomes, a few duds, and the occasional breakout. But when expectations are low, “okay” still looks great. And the rare hit looks like insane performance, because everyone is comparing it to a lower baseline.

Gary Vaynerchuk calls it “failing on purpose” — intentionally doing things you’re not good at yet, to loosen your fear of looking foolish. You pick a low-stakes version of the thing and do it in front of a smaller audience, before you feel ready.

He describes it as playing with house money. If you’ve ever won twenty dollars at a casino and suddenly felt like you could take on Vegas, you know the feeling. That money doesn’t quite register as yours yet, so you’re more willing to take bolder bets.

Being underestimated can create a similar mindset. If the world already thinks you’re a long shot, you’re playing with house money. You can try the weird idea. Apply for the thing you’re “not ready for.” Pitch the ambitious version instead of the safe one. The downside has already been priced in.

That mindset matters when the stakes get higher. This is one reason underdogs can perform surprisingly well in high-pressure moments. They’re not spending as much energy protecting an image. They can put more attention on the work itself, not the optics around it.

Edge Thought of the Week

If you’re being underestimated, don’t waste energy trying to change anyone’s mind. Treat it as room to experiment. Take a few “cheap failures” on purpose, small tests where the stakes are low and the learning is high.

Low expectations mean you’re not on stage yet, you’re in training. And steady training has a way of turning underestimation into surprise.

Until next time,

Laura

The fastest way to be wrong is to fall in love with your own idea. And I don’t mean “love” like a healthy I’m excited about this kind of love. I mean the kind where you start defending the idea like it’s your child. The kind where someone asks a basic question and you feel personally attacked, like they just questioned your parenting choices.

You know the feeling. You share an idea in a meeting, and someone asks something totally reasonable like: “Interesting. But what if…?” And suddenly your brain is like: Oh. We’re fighting today. That moment right there is where good ideas go to die. Not because the idea is bad, but because we get too attached to it to learn anything new.

In You Already Know, I talk about something called situational arrogance. It’s a context-specific mindset where you rely on what you think is your gut feel and suddenly feel extra certain in that moment. You stop listening because your mind has already decided, and you start ignoring signals that might point you toward a different conclusion. If someone pushes back and your first instinct is to build a case for why you’re right, rather than explore why you might be wrong, you’ve likely crossed that line.

That’s how people get locked into bad decisions for way too long, because backing down starts to feel like losing. And no one wants to lose to a question.

So how do you stay confident without becoming emotionally attached to your own opinion? The answer isn’t less confidence—it’s more flexibility with certainty. That’s intellectual humility: the capacity to hold a belief with conviction while leaving space for new information—strong beliefs, lightly held.

People hear “intellectual humility” and they imagine backing away from strong opinions, like it’s some sort of weakness. In reality, intellectual humility is a skill. It’s the ability to say: I believe this. I might be wrong. I’m willing to find out.

The hard part is doing that when the idea is yours, you’ve already pictured it working, and you’ve maybe even congratulated yourself.

Here are two practical ways to try it without turning into a chronic second-guesser.

First, before you pitch the idea, defend it, or recruit people around it, answer this question: What evidence would make me change my mind? If you can’t name anything, you’re not evaluating an idea. You’re protecting your worldview.

Second, invite a rigorous critique. Ask someone smart to stress-test it: “Can you try to poke holes in this? I want the strongest critique you can give.” Then resist the urge to argue. Your job is to listen and capture the best objections as data. Treat it like free consulting you didn’t have to pay for.

Strong ideas don’t require emotional protection. They’ll survive questions, and often improve because of them. If an idea can’t survive questions, it was never a great idea, it was just a shiny one.

The ideas we’re truly serious about deserve the toughest questions, not to dismantle them, but to make sure they’re worth keeping, and worth betting on.

So next time someone asks, “But what if…?” don’t reach for the boxing gloves. Reach for the notebook. Because the goal isn’t to win the meeting, it’s to win in reality. Questions help you get there.

Until next time,

Laura