The Decision I Kept to Myself

On borrowed ambition, honest iteration, and the sentence I still hadn't said

Not long ago I had a call with a mentee of mine about career moves. We came to a question I know too well and that everyone asks at some point: how do I know if I'm actually making progress. Reflecting on some past experiences, I gave an answer in under a minute. Decide what success looks like before you need it to look like something. I've given some version of that answer a dozen times, to mentees, to former colleagues, to people who found me through a mutual connection and wanted twenty minutes of my time. I've said some version of this in customer workshops too.

The call ended, and I dug through my notes. There, in my second brain, a project: "Podcast - Launch Plan". I've established its place in my notes and folders, moved a few items into it. Never revisited it since. Never deleted it either. I just carried it forward, something in the background, lingering but not quite in my focus. Its health was like that of a plant I wasn't watering but also wasn't willing to throw out.

On paper, this should have been simple. I've journeyed from a startup to Amazon, and am now building my own practice. I’ve read the books, the blogs, the newsletters. I’ve done the work. I have opinions, sharpened over years, about what actually changes across that range and what doesn't. I had episode ideas. I'd told myself, more than once, that I had clarity. I just needed to start.

For a long time, that's the story I told myself: I knew what to do and wasn't doing it. A nerve problem. If you'd asked me to write about it a year ago, that's the piece I would have written. Clarity was there. Conviction wasn't. Fix the second thing, ship the first.

Two things undid that story. I asked for feedback from people I trust: peers on similar paths, former professors, former colleagues. More than one of them, independently, landed on the same word. Generic. Not that anything was wrong with it. It just didn't sound like anyone in particular, least of all like me. One question that stuck with me was what made some of my podcast ideas different than the fifteen adjacent ones already out there. I didn't have an answer that held up.

Then the true discomfort hit me, hard. It wasn't entirely fear of exposure. It was closer to the feeling of wearing a mask, you know, the one that fits until it doesn’t. The more I reflected on my role, the more comfortable I felt as a facilitator, someone who helps people find their own answers rather than performs having all of them. A podcast built around me sharing specific steps to follow is the opposite of that. Turns out, I wasn't short on courage. I was certain about the wrong thing.

There's a peculiar sensation that comes with realizing that. It feels a little like finally remembering a word that had been on the tip of your tongue yet you couldn’t quite name it, not in any language. Or like being able to recognize a sound you'd grown so used to that you stopped consciously hearing it.

With this in mind, I took the step I would advise any client of mine to take: I tested my own assumption with a cheap version. I started writing. I explored topics similar to the territory I'd planned for the podcast. What kind of voice feels authentic? How do I like phrasing things? Then I captured what I discovered, about myself, about my ideas, about questions that arose organically.

Somewhere in there I noticed something a little embarrassing for someone about to argue this case in public: I don't actually like listening to podcasts. Fiction, occasionally. Everything else, I'd rather read. I'd spent all this time ideating and formulating plans for a format I barely consume myself, because it looked like the thing serious people in my position were supposed to build. Meanwhile I ignored things about myself. I’ve long loved to write. I journal daily. I actually enjoyed writing papers in school and got positive feedback on it, too.

Now here is where it gets difficult, personally. I've written before about leaders who keep a project alive on paper long after they've stopped actually working on it, calling it "ongoing" or “backlogged” so they never have to say it's over. I sat with this piece for two weeks (hello, missed publishing deadline) before I noticed I was doing exactly that to my own podcast idea. Nobody had heard me say I wasn't doing it. It wasn't on any list I'd shown anyone. It was just quietly not happening, which let me skip the harder step: deciding, on the record, that it wasn't happening, and living with whoever might ask about it afterward.

I don’t get to consult on my own blind spots.

So I made a plan. I picked an actual date. I wrote down what I want to see happen, what “success” looks like. Then I will sit down with my own mentor and talk through what comes next. Maybe keep going as is. Change the format. Widen where it reaches. The option quietly missing from that list is going back to the podcast, and I'm going to say that to them directly instead of letting them notice its absence on their own.

I don't know yet whether this current test will tell me anything conclusive. A few more weeks of data from a young habit isn't much to build a decision on, and I might be back here in a few weeks having learned less than I'd hoped.

What I do know is that there is a version of this I really wanted to tell, the one about finally finding the courage to act on something I'd always known. But that is just not where I am. The truer version is less flattering: I had to actually do something before I could tell whether what I wanted was mine or borrowed. And even after finding the real answer, I still caught myself letting the old one die quietly instead of saying, out loud, that it was dead.

I still kept the project folder, by the way. It’s still sitting exactly where it has been for so long. Bits are patient and fairly cheap. I haven't deleted it yet. Maybe I will, or maybe it gets to stay, a small monument to a plan I outgrew, which is a different thing entirely than a plan I was too scared to start.

I doubt I'm the only one carrying a folder like that. Something we've quietly stopped believing in but haven't declared over, moved forward from backup to backup because saying the actual sentence out loud is harder than just letting it ride along. I don't have a tidy way to close this. I haven't said mine out loud yet either, not to anyone who can hold me to it. Consider this me starting.