Ten years ago, I thought being good meant being impressive. Not just competent or reliable, but good in the way that gets noticed. The kind of good that earns a nod in a meeting or makes someone pause and say, “That’s really smart.” The kind of good that might, if you’re lucky, get you on a list somewhere—40 Under 40, Rising Star, Someone to Watch. You get the idea.

At the time, that felt like progress. And in some ways, it was. That drive pushed me to get sharper, faster, and more precise with my work. It taught me how to listen, adapt, and find the line that lands.

But looking back, I can see how much of that energy was tied up in something else—the need to prove that I belonged in the room in the first place. Maybe it was because I had switched fields and felt like I needed to prove that someone with a radio background had as much right to be there as someone who’d come from a portfolio school. Maybe it was because I was older than some of my colleagues and felt insecure about my abilities.

When you’re operating from that place, your focus naturally narrows. You start to care deeply about the parts of the work that are easiest to point to. I spent a long time chasing that feeling.

And then, slowly, almost without noticing it, the work started to ask something different of me.

It wasn’t one big moment so much as a pattern. Sitting in meetings where the writing was strong, but the idea felt off. Watching something beautifully crafted fall flat because it didn’t actually solve the problem it was meant to solve. Realizing that I could keep refining a sentence forever and still miss the point.

At some point, the question underneath the work changed. Not “Is this good?” but “Is this right?” It’s a subtle shift, but it changes everything. You start to notice how often cleverness fills the space where clarity should be. It’s so easy it is to admire something that sounds smart, but so much harder it is to create something that actually makes sense to someone outside the room. You start to see that no amount of strong writing can rescue a weak idea, and that most of the real work happens before anything is written at all.

So, you linger a little longer in the part where things are still unclear and where the answers aren’t formed yet. You ask questions that don’t always have immediate answers. You slow things down in ways that can feel uncomfortable, especially if you’re used to being the person who delivers. For a while, that felt like a loss of momentum. Like I wasn’t doing the job I’d trained myself to do. Now I understand that it is the job, just a different version of it.

Around the same time, something else started to shift. I stopped trying to get everything exactly right. Not because I lowered my standards, but because I started to recognize how often perfection is just another form of control. It’s a way of holding onto the work a little longer and protecting yourself from the moment when it leaves your hands and becomes something other people will interpret, question, or change.

Letting go of that doesn’t mean the work gets sloppier. If anything, it gets stronger. There’s more movement, more openness, and more room for the idea to evolve beyond what you could have made on your own.

The work is never just yours. It happens in rooms, in conversations, and in the space between people. And for a long time, I was so focused on what I was contributing that I missed what was happening around me. Now, that’s often the first thing I notice—where the energy drops, where something isn’t landing, and what’s not being said. If the room isn’t working, the work won’t, either, and once you start paying attention to that, your role shifts whether you mean for it to or not.

You’re still writing, shaping language, and finding the line. But you’re also listening differently. You’re asking different questions and stepping in at different moments. Not just to contribute, but to unlock.

There was a time when that felt like stepping away from the part of the job I was best at. Now it feels like the most important part of it. Because what I care about now isn’t whether the best line came from me. It’s whether the work is better because I was there.

Ten years ago, I was focused on being impressive. Now I care more about being useful than being impressive. And that shift has changed not just how I work, but how I think about the work in the first place.