Stop Being So F*cking Humble
why i'm getting better at being a narcissist
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My sister, in a recent and misplaced spat of rage, called me a narcissistâan accusation that I found quite flattering. Truthfully, itâs one of the nicer things sheâs ever said about me.
If Iâm honest with myself and you, I didnât examine the cost of my self-effacement until several years deep into my first business after mistaking it for a natural and mostly harmless state of being. Iâm someone who could have long benefitted from cultivating more self-important characteristics, but instead operated from the wounded place of shrinking myself.
Specifically, being someone who needed or relied on people didnât align with the identity I had carefully constructed for myself, and it certainly wasnât something I thought of as leverage.
When I started my beauty brand, I positioned myself as scrappy and resourceful, and I found it validating when others reflected this back to me. This external validation became one of the only metrics by which I could measure my success. The only KPI I tracked at that point was how often people called me scrappy. I had successfully scaled a $200 investment to a 6-figure business in just a few short years, with a 281% revenue growth rate within a matter of monthsâalthough I was unreasonably disappointed I hadnât gotten it to 7. Objectively outstanding, sure, but I donât think I was particularly all that impressed with myself.
Being humble and fiercely independent became an inadvertent strategy. My fear of reliance and appearing self-important subconsciously led me to perform the founder act solo for much of my career. It was just easier to navigate success in the shadows. Besides, how could anyone possibly share the level of willpower that always got me from A to B?
Self-created breakthroughs have always felt like the most natural pathway to any goal.
As a freshman, when I hated the miserable little college I attended in the middle of bumfuck Pennsylvania and decided I wanted to transfer, I simplyâŚ.transferred. I set my sights on New York City, with no parental involvement until I sprung on my mom that âI was moving to New York in a week, by the way,â and asked if she could drive me. She dropped me off and I took shelter in my self-assigned housing. A month later I got a job so I could afford Thai with my NYU friends at Cafetesia.
This allergy to being unburdened didnât just develop at 19, of course. Perhaps I inherited it in-vitro as the eldest daughter.
I could always depend on myself as the most reliable and judgement-free option.
Besides, if anyone would have dared try to hold my hand along the way, I would have genuinely wondered what they were getting out of it.
Baby Narcs
In orchestra I was second chair to *Stephanie, despite being perfectly capable of first. In dance I was second to *Demi who had tinier feet and a seemingly more flexible split, while I settled into showcasing my less impressive floor straddle.
I was the understudy to *Amelia as Clementine in the 6th grade play of My Darling Clementineâthough now that I think about it in hindsight, that may have actually been due to r.âŚnevermind.
These girls put on display that they were proud to shine, and their confidence carried a contagion. Everyone, even me, began to think of them as important and special. But I couldnât imagine this level of attention for myself. It just seemed unnecessary anyway.
The baby narcs I came second to all shared a common thread. They simply decided the room was theirs and made everyone else deal with it. They didnât seem to care about how much people talked behind their backs about whether or not they were worthy of the thing. They believed they deserved help, hands, and attention. After all, the best baby narcissists donât see it wrong to put themselves at the center.
Often, I didnât feel comfortable letting my audience know how good I was at, frankly, everything worth being good at. In the off moments of appearing full of myself, it never really fared well. âI thought I was better than everybody,â you know?
Instead, I deepened my resistance to being the best. Besides, what if people started to expect the best from me all the time?
Iâm afraid if I hadnât started a business I would have gone through life unaware of this insidious and useless pattern.
I had a call with the iconic Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures once, and despite how nervous I tend to be on calls, we really kind of hit it off. She seemed genuinely impressed with what I was building and placed an order mid-chat. If it were performative, it went over my head.
I was âtoo earlyâ for her to end up investing, and at this time I was doing everything end to endâdown to the formulasâwhich looking back, I think was really none of her business. After I bled out to Kirsten, she tenderly shot back with the most obvious observation imaginable: âOf course, look at all that youâre doing! Youâre by yourself!â
It tickles me that I hadnât even considered this, as glaring as the obstacle was. I was more surprised she had seemed sympathetic towards the thought of me doing everything. It wasnât often at that time, that I felt that people felt for me.
Iâd expected our conversation to unlock some profound truth, perhaps about my incompetence as a businessperson, or the blind spots in my customer journey sequence, but what she reflected back was that the only thing separating me from the next stage was the fact that I refused to grant anyone the permission to worship me.
Engines and Minions
Founder-led brands are thriving because they offer one of the few socially acceptable frameworks for women to put their narcissistic traits on display. The figure of female founder operates as a character for audiences to project onto. After all, society only tolerates women taking up that much space when itâs in service to something external, like a child or a brand.
So if a female leader is increasingly filling your timeline, it isnât the result of some rare stroke of luck or a sudden swell of consumer demand. No matter how unassuming she is or above it she pretends to beâtrust and believe that her omnipresence is deliberate; a byproduct of her own self-regard.
Itâs why I roll my eyes when public figures act as though fame is an inconvenience, when in reality it has to be relentlessly and intentionally cultivated.
None of it is miraculous nor accidental. Not even the Becca Bloom phenomenon.
When you get defeated seeing celebrities, or even your most hated influencers, you have to put into perspective just how many people are dedicated to making that one singular person successful. I donât think the average human can even contextualize just how much engineering goes into making the talent look effortless. Directing that machine requires godlike conviction and a comfort of power. Do you think the people surrounded by entire ecosystems of handlers are waving them off like, âNo, shoo, relax, Iâm just like you?â Absolutely the hell not.
When I worked at EMI Music, we had an entire team dedicated solely to Katy Perry. Another team just for Gorillaz, and so on and so forth. And thatâs before you even count their own external teams outside of the label.
Did I think Katy felt bad that there was some unpaid emaciated intern in frayed Nine West boots skipping lunch to do the invoicing for the $1000+ manicure she had at the Grammys?
Meanwhile, Iâd feel awful if I didnât need one of my girls for a production day because, what if it caused them to miss a bill or something?
Reluctant Tyranny
As I journeyed deeper into beauty business world, the discrepancies between me and the most successful founders I knew became even more obvious.
I learned that people saw The Established as a white-girl VC brandâboth from the way they reacted when I appeared on the other end of a Zoom screen and from what someone once told me directly on a call. I was not flattered by this. Not for the reason you may assume, but because it exposed just how much I was still doing myself. It stopped being cute. Like it gets to a point!
It was the shame of still making my own products that finally pushed me to hire my first production assistants.
Before that, I was afraid of confronting how much real help would demand of me. Afraid someone would gladly work for pennies and âexperience,â and Iâd end up owing them a future I couldnât guarantee. I felt premature guilt that I might wake up one day and decide Iâd rather prioritize marrying rich, and be stuck figuring out how to reimburse a team for the time they wasted on my indecision and career-commitment issues.
My hard-won lesson is this: while you can create miracles solo, you canât scale miracles. Miracles are one-person stunts. Even the most mediocre engine of minions will get you further along in comparison.
The best leaders already know this.
They know theyâre at the helm, and they donât apologize for the arrangement. They simply see it as natural. They see themselves as the gravitational center and embody a belief system that says above everything and everybody else, they deserve to be seen.
The most successful and most visible receive support the way a toddler receives a juicebox. Of course youâre handing me this. Why the hell wouldnât you?
Anyways, Iâm done mistaking fear for virtue. The next time someone offers to hold my hand, Iâm taking it. And Iâm assuming they know exactly how lucky they are!
If you liked this, read:
As with all of your articles, I love it! Maybe I should stop being so âF*ing Humbleâ cause Iâm all that. Ainât I.
THIS