Selective editing.

Jennifer and I just wrapped up a winter sabbatical in Northern California and returned home to Upstate New York last week. Unfortunately, my sleeping has been wacky since we got back, and I've been waking up at about 4 a.m. each morning. I can't just lie there awake, so I head downstairs to catch up on email from our living room couch in the dark.

So there I was this past Monday morning when an email came through from a reader. She was responding to a recent newsletter where I mentioned shutting down my two courses that generated 75% of my revenue. Her note was short and kind, and she wrapped it up saying:

"I wish I were the kind of person who could make bold moves like that so easily."

I looked at that line for a minute, because I wasn’t sure that "bold" was the right word for what happened. I'd just gotten tired of being the guy who sold LinkedIn courses, and the decision certainly didn't feel brave from my perspective. And I don't think of myself as a bold person.

When I think of bold moves, I think of people like my friend Steve Schlafman and the moves I've watched him make over the course of his ever-changing career.

And no move was bolder than walking away from his venture capital fund.

Back in 2021, Steve was a week from launching his own fund, and fifty investors had already committed. He'd raised millions of dollars and put in a year of hard work leading up to the big launch. But there he was, about to send an email to all those investors, basically saying, "I've changed my mind, and this is not happening after all." Yikes.

One morning, he finally sent that email.

Back then, I didn't know Steve. He was just one of my favorite writers on Twitter because I liked how his brain worked and the thoughtfulness he wrote with. And I remember when he tweeted a link to this essay about shutting down his fund, and how I felt reading it for the first time. Weirdly, I was jealous.

Not because he was taking back control of his career. I simply envied his boldness. He was someone who could stare down a giant, scary decision, understand the cost, and pull the trigger anyway. I've spent most of my life avoiding confrontation of any kind, and writing an email like Steve's (let alone sending it) would have probably made me physically ill.

I remember closing his essay and thinking, "I'm just not built like that."

About a year later, Jennifer and I moved to a small town up in the Hudson Valley of New York, for reasons that had nothing to do with Steve. But it turned out Steve lived a few miles up the road from our new house. He saw on Twitter that I'd moved up here, and he reached out to initiate a coffee date. I was half star-struck and half weirded out that one of my favorite writers on Twitter suddenly knew I existed.

Rereading it

As I was lying there thinking about that reader calling me bold, I remembered Steve's essay and pulled it up again. And after four years of actually knowing the author, it read a bit differently.

Just a few paragraphs down the page, four words in particular stood out:

"I was scared shitless."

Steve had written about sitting at his kitchen table that morning, trying to work up the courage to hit send. His heart rate spiking. Butterflies going wild in his stomach. Weeks of agonizing before that morning. Long talks with his coach, his therapist, and his wife.

In his own words, he was scared shitless.

It was all right there on the same pages I'd read back in 2021. Clear as can be, in plain English. Steve had been terrified to make the big move that I could only remember as bold.

The interesting part is that back then, I hadn't registered any of it. I don't know what to call that. Because I didn't just miss it. Missing something sounds like an accident. It was more like selective editing.

My brain read Steve's essay and trimmed it down to the version that I needed it to be. It kept the part where he sent the email, and cut the whole part where he felt like throwing up first.

I guess I'd needed that edited version because the real one calls into question who I am. My ability to handle discomfort. If I thought Steve had been as scared as I would have been and did it anyway, what the hell does that say about me? So I took all of his honesty and whittled it down until it let me off the hook.

I'm just not built like that.

I texted Steve

On Tuesday afternoon, I texted Steve to ask if I could write about him this week. He said, of course, and added something I wasn't expecting.

Yes, he'd been nervous and scared. But he'd also been running small experiments for years. Coaching a few clients on the side, testing whether the work felt right, and seeing if he could actually walk away from the VC world and land in a good spot. By the time he sat down at his kitchen table to send that email, he wasn't risking his entire career. He already had evidence he'd be okay.

He sent me an article by Jim Collins called "Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs." The idea is that before you fire the big cannonball, you fire small bullets first to see if you can hit the target. Then, once you've got the aim down, you fire with conviction.

"From the outside, it looked bold," Steve wrote. "But I knew I was going to nail the landing."

I thought about that for a minute, because it made my 2021 selective editing job even worse. Not only did I edit out Steve’s fear, but I also deleted the years of preparation that made the fear survivable for him. I'd been envying this one dramatic, bold moment, while completely erasing everything that made the moment possible for him.

It turns out that bold movers aren't just scared people who do the thing anyway. They're scared people who've also been preparing for a long time, and then make the big move. Athletes and astronauts. Prepared and scared shitless at the exact same time.

As I flipped back to the email from my reader, I realized she was seeing this one bold moment without any of the work that led up to it.

What my reader was really saying

She called the course shutdown bold, but I'd been pivoting away from tactical social media and solopreneur guides for over a year. Writing newsletters in a style that feels more authentic to where I am now. Paying attention to which ones landed and which ones felt hollow. Overhauling other parts of my business behind the scenes. By the time I actually shut those courses down, it wasn't some blind leap of faith. It was the last step of a long, slow process that she couldn't see from her vantage point.

I think she's doing what I did to Steve. Seeing the single moment. Selectively editing the work underneath it. Using that version as evidence that some people are just "built to move that way." Just not her.

I've been guilty of this for most of my life. I've created stories about people who seem to be built differently from me, and used those stories as permission to stay stuck and comfortable. Steve was one of those stories before I ever knew him personally.

I'm not saying fear is irrelevant. Sometimes it's telling you something important, and you should listen to it. But there's a real difference between listening to your fear and waiting for it to go away before you decide to do anything. Nobody I know has ever done a hard thing after the fear completely subsided. They did it while the fear was still loud, usually with some serious preparation alongside it.

The bottom line

It turns out that the Steve I envied in 2021 never existed. He was a character I needed to believe in so I could stay comfortable in my own life.

The real Steve worries and second-guesses and gets scared. He also runs experiments before he makes a bold move. He moved while he was scared, wrote honestly about it, and I edited out the fear and the preparation because a different story was more useful to me.

I haven't written back to my reader yet. I'm not exactly sure what to say. Maybe just that the move she called bold didn't feel bold from where I was. That most of what looks like boldness is probably just someone who's been preparing for a while, got tired enough of one thing to start another, and then made the move scared shitless.

So here's my question for you this week:

Whose story have you edited down so you can keep telling yourself, “I’m just not built like that?”

Reply and tell me about it. While I can't reply to everyone, Jennifer and I read every response, and we love hearing from you.

That's all for this week.

See you next Saturday.