Modesty. I ditched it a long time ago. Several kilometers back. Not humility. I kept that.
Modesty…the particular human performance of knowing something and pretending not to. Feeling something and waiting for someone else to say it first. Seeing something clearly, then sanding down the edges of the knowing so nobody mistakes your certainty for audacity.
I got tired of it.
I stopped playing the cat-and-mouse portion of the romantic and platonic partnership game, too. Besides, anyone who has spent any real time with me knows I am enigmatic enough to warrant a sufficient amount of frustration all by myself. No need to manufacture additional mystery.
So, I figured out one way to prune the overgrowth of modesty in my life: I started saying I love you the moment I knew it. Not because saying it guaranteed anything; quite the opposite. Loving someone doesn't promise partnership or claim ownership of the other person. It certainly doesn't negotiate reciprocity or decide the future. Love is declarative.
It just is.
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Once, I knew someone as a soulmate during our first phone conversation; so, I told them. A couple of days later, they told me they knew it, too. And when I finally stood in front of them for the first time, when I could physically look into their eyes, I told them I loved them. Two weeks later, they said they loved me, too.
The whole thing ended within six weeks.
I still love them. And the cosmos still ties us. Not in a “we're destined to find our way back to each other ” sort of way. Maybe we are. Maybe we aren't. That's not mine to know. But some people enter your life and become part of its architecture. The relationship can end without undoing the recognition, and time can pass without revising what was true when it happened.
No relationship needed. No regrets logged. Ask me again in twenty years, and I'd still say it again.
Which, naturally, brings me to job interviews.
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Of late, as my calendar fills with candidates applying for roles, I've been wondering why we play so coy during the interview process. Everyone pretends not to know much about what they want and need from the organizations they are applying to, while simultaneously grandstanding about things they don’t intrinsically feel or care about. Then organizations post job descriptions that reveal only a fraction of the actual work and none of the internal dynamics that shape the conditions under which that work will be required. The candidate carefully parcels out their thinking to present a veneer of competence, not wanting to reveal too much of their hand or shortcomings. Hiring teams ask questions the candidate has already researched and formed opinions about in a strange, unintentional game of gotcha (thanks, internet). We all avoid saying too much about what we'd change or what’s wrong/missing because we haven't "earned" the right yet. And somewhere inside all of this restraint, we're supposed to determine whether we should spend forty-ish hours a week together.
For years. With only a resume, cover letter, 1-3 conversations, and maybe a portfolio of work that may or may not align with the distinct challenges of the role in question. Oh, yeah, let’s not forget the highly biased “professional” references we provide and meticulously check.
Wild.
So, in my own application process, I decided to pull back the curtain of modesty, use the information available to me, and present something gritty but actionable. When I could see the work ahead, behind the information presented neatly in a single-page job description and the polished responses to the three questions I got to ask about an organization in the last ten minutes of an interview, I started saying so.
Not: Here's why I'm an excellent candidate.
But: Here's what I see.
Here's what I think is happening in your market. What seems important about this particular moment in your organization's life. The questions I'd ask before touching anything. The people I'd want to learn from, and the systems I'd want to crawl inside.
Here's what I imagine the first 120 days could look like.
So I started building little Replit microsites to make the thinking tangible and operational. Not promises or prescriptions. Only declarations.
This is what I see from here. This is how my brain meets your problem. This is what I might build with you if we decide to work together.
Then I sent them to organizations and used the builds to form a new section in my resume as examples. The results? 3 ghosts. 6 loose threads. 2 offers. Which feels about right, lol. Because declaration isn't a strategy for getting picked. And getting picked doesn’t guarantee things will work out.
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Saying I love you doesn't make someone love you back. Showing someone exactly how you'd approach their organization doesn't make them hire you. Clarity isn't leverage, and it isn't a clever way to manufacture reciprocity. It is simply the decision to stop withholding what is already true because you're afraid of what someone else will do with it.
I can love you without possessing you. I can see possibility in your organization without needing to be the person you choose to build it. I can tell you what I see, and you can tell me what you see. And then we know something we didn't know before.
Maybe that's partnership. Or, maybe that's six weeks.
Maybe that's an offer letter; maybe that's a ghost, or a loose thread neither of us knows what to do with yet. The outcome doesn't make the declaration less true.
So, yes. I'd do it again.
In love. In work.
Probably everywhere else, I'm still discovering that I've been making myself smaller to appear appropriately uncertain, because there are enough things in this life that require interpretation.
So, when you know—
just say so.
And then go listen to “Just Say So” by PJ Morton and JoJo.
