You're going to have to put yourself out there

Look at this padlock. I bought it on Temu because I wanted something cute for a storage space: no key, letter combination, easy, practical, nice. Click, bought.

Hard to see it locked. A relief to cut it off.

It worked perfectly until I had to use it for something more serious. When I sorted that out, I changed the code. A wave of my own insecurities, the kind that are more made-up than real, washed over me right at that moment and I made the decision. New code.

Padlock closed, everything under control. But of course, everything was not under control. That's when the loss of control itself began: because I forgot the combination.

I spent 48 hours, two or three hours a day, trying words. With logic, with intuition, with AI. Nothing. The new code had seemed so obvious in the moment that I didn't even register it. So it wasn't that obvious. All of this was like when you go round and round on a project trying to make it better, without realizing that all that time is nothing more than delaying its birth. If I had found the code, maybe today we'd be talking about perseverance. But I didn't find it. I had to cut it off.

After cutting it came the reflection. What a reflection.

Someone asked me a question that threw a bucket of cold water in my face: do you realize that you yourself closed off everything you have stored inside? You hacked yourself. You put a padlock on something nobody is going to come looking for: you have to let it out yourself.

That's when I understood this was hard, but also an enormous lesson: what we don't want to open and make more accessible will never see the light if we don't allow it.

And I'm not talking about the door. I'm talking about everything we guard more carefully than a dragon guards a princess in a tower: ideas, projects, parts of ourselves that we keep under lock and key because at some point we decided it was more comfortable that way.

Who wins with that? Nobody. Who loses? Everyone.

As you create and put your own stamp on things, you're going to have to go out and tell people about it. And you'll realize you're not working on your beloved private diary. Sometimes we need a padlock to fall on our heads to show our Simba to the rest of the animals in the kingdom. I needed someone to come along and make me see it. Cheers for that.

This was one of those forced personal realizations that marks a momentum. The kind where you have to break the fourth wall to keep going, from the feedback of others, from what others make us see, from putting value on what's ours and going from playing "wouldn't it be nice" to playing in the league of "this is actually great."

While we protect that ideal version of ourselves, we sacrifice the possibility of showing the real one. The belief system says that putting yourself out there is a bad idea. Better to be seen building than to wait for the perfect version of what you built*.

The Temu padlock: cheap. The lesson: a little more expensive. Worth it 100%.

*I heard something like this from Sofi Tardáguila.