Oprah once shared that at the end of each of her interviews (she's done 37,000), the person across the table always asks the same question: “was that ok?”
We want reassurance. It’s our way of soothing the sting of uncertainty.
I have an intimate relationship with uncertainty. As I build Mixed, I’m paying very real costs today—financial, mental, social, time—for an unknown tomorrow. It’s the act of paying that uncertainty cost without immediate return that’s difficult. The wider the gap between the payment and payback period, the greater the uncertainty, the harder it is to stay in the game, but often times—the larger the reward.
When we’re in a state of uncertainty, we naturally reach for reassurance. It’s cozy comfort on a cold night. It can masterfully disguise itself as proficiency, but it’s unreliable fuel that motivates us one day and stops us dead in our tracks the next.
When we’re seeking reassurance, what we’re really doing is asking these vulnerable questions:
Am I enough?
Did you think that was good?
Does anybody care?
Did you think that was good?
Does anybody care?
But we're not asking honest questions. We're looking for comfort. We crave reassurance because we just want to be accepted! But if you’ve ever been reassured by friends, strangers—whoever, you know that not too long after, you simply want more. Our desire for reassurance never ends. So we need to rework our relationship with acceptance. Perhaps we don’t need to be accepted by a nebulous “everyone”, only specific “someones”—or maybe even no one at all. Perhaps we can substitute it with something even more reliable and within our control—evidence.
I wrote about reassurance back in 2021, a few months after I launched Mixed. The newsletter, Everything Might Not Be Ok, ended with a question about how to gain self-assurance. It wasn’t clear to me back then, but today it’s become at least a little clearer:
We become more self assured as we put in the work, without fuss, for a long period of time. With each rep, we prove to ourselves that we are enough, that the work is good, and it becomes clear that at least some people care. It is our commitment to the work and the results we see from it that provides a material sense of self-belief. If the results are in front of us, we don’t need to ask someone else if they can see them too. We can see them for ourselves.
I can keep dissecting it, but it’s pretty simple—at the end of the day, you just have to get started.
Launch the business, write the pitch, wear the print.
And once you do, keep your head down, and just keep going.