How a habit that once protected my creativity began limiting my opportunities—and why I’ve decided to change it.

I’ve always been something of a silent implementer.

I get an idea, and I start working on it. I research, experiment, make plans, change those plans, set things aside when necessary, and come back to them later. Sometimes a project develops over weeks. Sometimes months or even years.

Eventually, I reach a point where I feel like I have something worth showing people. And that’s usually when I tell them what I’ve been doing.

Not when I first have the idea. Not when I’m excited about the possibilities. Not when I’m figuring things out.

Only when I have something tangible to show for my efforts.

I’ve always considered this a fairly practical approach. I enjoy working independently, and I don’t need an audience for every thought that crosses my mind. But recently, I’ve been questioning whether this habit is entirely a matter of preference.

The more I examine it, the more I realize that somewhere along the way, I learned to treat my own enthusiasm as something that needed protecting. And I’m beginning to understand just how much that has influenced my adult life.

Learning to Keep Things to Myself

When I was a kid, I loved writing and drawing.

I could spend hours creating stories, inventing characters, and drawing whatever came into my imagination. I was pretty good at both, especially for my age, and I enjoyed the process itself.

I didn’t need anyone to participate. I wasn’t trying to sell anything or build an audience. I was simply creating things because I liked creating them.

But there was another part of childhood that wasn’t quite so enjoyable.

I learned that letting other people know what mattered to me could give them an opportunity to use it against me.

If other kids knew something bothered me, they could use that information to bother me even more.

But the opposite was also true. If they discovered something I genuinely enjoyed, they might tease me for liking it. Or find a way to interfere with it, simply because they knew it mattered to me.

I was a nerdy kid with interests that weren’t necessarily shared by everyone around me. And I learned that sometimes the easiest way to enjoy those interests was to keep them to myself.

Looking back, I can see how a relatively simple rule developed:
If people don’t know what matters to me, they can’t use it against me.

At the time, that was a useful strategy. I could write my stories, draw my pictures, and explore whatever interested me without having to explain or defend any of it.

My enthusiasm was mine. Other people couldn’t easily interfere with something they didn’t know existed. And because my creative pursuits were largely independent activities, keeping them private didn’t really cost me anything.

At least, not anything I recognized at the time.

When Childhood Lessons Follow Us Into Adulthood

The trouble with strategies we develop early in life is that we don’t necessarily stop using them when our circumstances change. Sometimes they become so familiar that we don’t even recognize them as strategies anymore. They simply become part of how we operate.

For me, keeping my plans to myself became second nature. And that tendency was reinforced during a relationship that lasted 19 years, a significant portion of my adult life.

Throughout that relationship, I frequently encountered skepticism when I talked about things I wanted to accomplish. I’d share an idea or an ambition, and the response would often focus on why it wouldn’t work, why it wasn’t practical, or why I wouldn’t be able to pull it off.

Sometimes those objections were based on the other person’s personal experience. Sometimes they were just general assumptions about what was or wasn’t possible.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t believe every expression of skepticism is harmful. There is real value in having people around us who challenge our assumptions and help us identify problems we haven’t considered.

But there’s a difference between helping someone think through an obstacle and making them feel foolish for believing they might overcome it. And when the second kind of response becomes then norm, it’s easy to fall back on the strategy you learned years earlier.

Keep the idea to yourself.
Work on it privately.
And don’t say anything until you’ve already accomplished what you set out to do.

That way, instead of explaining why you think something might be possible, you can simply demonstrate that you did it.

For a long time, that seemed like a reasonable solution… Until I started recognizing a problem with it.

The Job I Wasn’t Supposed to Get

One of the clearest examples came when I decided I wanted to work for Amazon Web Services (AWS). I was relatively new to the technology industry, having made a significant career change in my mid-40s.

I wanted to work at AWS specifically, although I would have been happy to get my foot in the door anywhere within Amazon.

It was an ambitious goal. I knew that. But I also believed I had something valuable to contribute.

When I shared that ambition with my partner at the time, the response was discouraging.

I was told there was no way I’d be hired directly into a company like Amazon with so little experience in the industry. I’d have to start at the bottom somewhere else and work my way up before a company like AWS would even consider me.

It wasn’t presented as a challenge I might be able to overcome. It was presented as something that simply wasn’t going to happen.

But I applied anyway. Repeatedly. And in September 2021, I started my new job at AWS.

I accomplished exactly what I’d been told I couldn’t do. You might think that would have settled the matter. It didn’t.

The explanation changed. Now, instead of being told I couldn’t get hired, I was told that I’d only gotten the job because I was a woman. That diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives had given me an advantage I wouldn’t otherwise have had. That if the hiring decision had been based strictly on technical qualifications, I wouldn’t have been selected.

Think about what that does to the original argument.

First, I supposedly couldn’t accomplish something because I wasn’t qualified.

Then when I accomplished it, the accomplishment itself was dismissed.

I had succeeded, but somehow that still didn’t count. And the criticism didn’t end there.

Earlier this year, after our relationship ended, I heard another version of the same assessment. With layoffs happening in the technology industry, he “predicted” that my time at AWS would come to an end because I didn’t have the technical proficiency my position required, and eventually the company would recognize that and let me go.

By that point, I had been working at AWS for nearly five years.

I’d learned an enormous amount, earned additional responsibilities, received a promotion, helped customers through complex technical problems, and contributed to training and mentoring other engineers.

That doesn’t mean I knew everything. I certainly didn’t, and still don’t. But it was evidence of my ability to learn, adapt, and contribute in a demanding technical environment. And yet, according to his assessment, I was still just waiting to be found out.

I tried not to let those comments bother me. But they did.

Anyone who has ever experienced imposter syndrome knows how easily that kind of criticism can find its way into the doubts you already carry.

It’s one thing to encounter a technical problem you don’t immediately know how to solve. It’s another to have someone close to you repeatedly state, in no uncertain terms, that you don’t belong there in the first place.

For a while, this reinforced that I should be even more careful about revealing my ambitions. But recently, I’ve started seeing it differently.

If someone is unwilling to recognize my capabilities, accomplishing something may not change their opinion. They’ll simply find a different explanation for why my accomplishment doesn’t count.

And that means waiting until I have enough proof to silence every objection is a strategy that can never really succeed. There will always be another objection.

At some point, I have to decide that other people’s assessments of my potential are not the final authority on what I’m capable of, or qualified for, or where I should/should not invest my time and effort.

When Protection Becomes a Limitation

This realization made me think differently about the habit I developed as a child.

Back then, keeping my interests private helped protect my enthusiasm. Today, the same habit has the opposite effect.

It’s no longer protecting my enthusiasm. It’s limiting my opportunities, which in turn dampens my enthusiasm.

And I think the reason is that the nature of my ambitions has changed.

When I was a child, I didn’t need anyone else’s participation to enjoy writing stories or drawing pictures. If I wanted to create something, I could just create it. Whether anyone else liked it was irrelevant.

I could still do that today, of course. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing creative interests purely for personal enjoyment. But that’s no longer the entire purpose of the things I’m working on.

I’m developing ideas that I want to turn into professional endeavors. Writing projects, educational resources, consulting services, and other initiatives intended to help people solve problems or make meaningful changes in their lives.

Those things don’t exist solely for my own enjoyment. They’re meant to serve other people. And that means I need other people to participate.

I need feedback from readers to understand whether my ideas are resonating.

I need conversations with potential customers to understand what they actually need.

I need collaborators, professional relationships, and opportunities to connect with people who have complementary knowledge and experience.

Some of those relationships could help me recognize problems before I’ve invested months in the wrong direction. Others could lead to opportunities I wouldn’t even know existed if I kept everything to myself.

By waiting until my work feels sufficiently polished to share, I may be eliminating some of the very interactions that could make it better.

This is quite the predicament; the strategy I developed to protect the things I cared about may also be interfering with my ability to accomplish them.

The Difference Between Feedback and Permission

I don’t think the answer is to start announcing every idea I have.

I still value the creative process that happens privately. I enjoy research. I enjoy experimenting with possibilities and allowing ideas to develop before deciding what to do with them.

Sometimes an idea needs time before it’s ready for outside input. And not every personal ambition needs to become public knowledge.

But I’m beginning to see an important distinction between choosing privacy because it serves the work, and choosing privacy because I’m afraid of what someone might say. One is a deliberate decision. The other is a limitation.

I’m also learning to distinguish between asking for feedback and asking for permission.

If I’m writing a book, I want to understand whether the ideas are clear, useful, and worth exploring.

If I’m developing a consulting service, I absolutely want to know whether potential customers see value in what I’m offering.

If someone identifies a genuine weakness in my approach, I want to hear it.

But none of that means I need everyone to agree that my ambition is worthwhile before I’m allowed to pursue it.

Someone can question whether my business model is viable without determining whether I’m capable of building a business.

Someone can disagree with an idea without invalidating my right to explore it.

And someone can believe that I’m unlikely to succeed without that belief becoming a prediction I have to accept.

I can invite other people into the process without handing them authority over the outcome.

That’s the separation I want to become better at maintaining.

What If It Doesn’t Work?

There’s another reason I’ve typically kept my plans private.

When you announce what you’re going to do, you create the possibility that other people will know if you don’t accomplish it.

What happens if I announce a business venture and it never becomes profitable? What if I talk about writing a book and eventually decide it isn’t worth finishing?

What if I spend months developing something and discover that the original idea simply wasn’t very good?

For much of my life, those possibilities would have been additional reasons to stay quiet until I could demonstrate success. But something has changed in how I think about them.

These days, I suspect I’d be more inclined to write about the experience.

What was I trying to accomplish?
What did I believe would work?
What actually happened?
What did I try to change?
And at what point did I decide that continuing wasn’t the best use of my time and resources?

Those seem like potentially valuable things to share. After all, abandoning a project isn’t necessarily evidence that starting it was a mistake.

Sometimes the most useful thing we learn from testing an idea is that we should pursue a different one. We can’t always know that before we begin.

And there’s a difference between making a commitment to accomplish something vs. exploring a hypothesis about what might be possible.

I can be serious about an idea without promising that I’ll pursue it forever.

I can make a thoughtful decision with the information I have today, and change that decision when I learn something new.

I can also acknowledge when I’ve made mistakes without treating those mistakes as evidence that I shouldn’t have tried at all.

The alternative is to demand certainty before taking action. And certainty is a luxury that most meaningful endeavors simply don’t provide.

Learning to Think Differently About Freedom

The end of my 19-year relationship earlier this year has created an opportunity for a great deal of reflection.

When you’ve spent that much of your adult life in a particular environment, it’s not always obvious how much you’ve adapted to it.

Some adjustments are conscious. Others become so routine that you stop noticing you’re making them.

I realize now that I had become accustomed to anticipating objections before I even shared an idea. I could almost hear the reasons something wouldn’t work before anyone said them out loud. And because I’d been practicing that habit since childhood, it felt natural to simply avoid the conversation.

Now, with that relationship behind me, I’m experiencing a kind of freedom that goes beyond making decisions independently. I’m beginning to think about my future without automatically preparing to defend it.

I can be excited about an idea without immediately cataloging all the reasons someone else might dismiss it.

I can imagine possibilities before deciding whether they’re practical.

And I can choose to share those possibilities with people who might help me develop them.

That doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly become immune to criticism. I doubt I ever will. It also doesn’t mean that every idea I have is brilliant, or that every project I start will become successful. Some won’t.

But I no longer want the possibility of criticism to determine how I approach opportunities. I especially don’t want to continue limiting my own opportunities in anticipation of reactions that may never happen.

I’ve spent enough time doing that.

Letting People See the Work in Progress

So I’m going to try something different.

I’m going to become more open about what I’m working on before I have a finished product to show for it.

Not because I need validation. And not because I’ve decided that every ambition belongs on social media. But because some of the things I want to accomplish will benefit from involving other people earlier.

I’ve been working on several projects over the past year, some of which I’ve shared in pieces and others I’ve barely mentioned publicly.

They reflect interests I’ve had for a long time: understanding complex problems, helping people recognize possibilities they might not have considered, and developing practical ways to move from where they are to where they want to be.

Some are further along than others. Some may eventually become businesses. Others may become books, educational resources, or something I haven’t fully envisioned yet.

And some may change substantially, or never become what I originally imagined at all. I’m growing more comfortable with that possibility.

What matters to me now is that I give those ideas a fair opportunity to develop, including the chance to benefit from conversations and relationships I might otherwise have missed.

Looking back, I don’t regret being the kid who kept her stories and drawings to herself. She found a way to enjoy creating in an environment where sharing her enthusiasm didn’t always feel safe.

And I don’t regret becoming someone who can work independently, explore complex ideas, and keep going without needing constant encouragement. Those are qualities I still value.

What I want to release is the belief that I need to protect my ambitions by keeping them invisible, because the circumstances that taught me to do that no longer reflect what I need from the world around me.

I can still enjoy the quiet work of creating. I can still decide which ideas need time and which are ready for discussion.

I can still trust myself to determine which feedback is useful and which opinions don’t deserve much weight.

But I can also let other people in. And maybe that’s what freedom looks like for me at this stage of life.

Not becoming someone entirely different. Just recognizing that something I learned to do a long time ago no longer serves the person I’ve become.

I learned to keep my dreams to myself because I thought that was how I protected them.

Now I’m learning that some dreams need to be shared if I want to give them the best chance to grow.