Listen

Before you build anything there is a quiet season. We almost always skip it.

Not out of recklessness. Listening looks too much like doing nothing, and when the project is yours, doing nothing is frightening. There is a strange urgency in the first days, the feeling that if you do not start now somebody will beat you to it. It is almost never true. And that hurry gets paid in full later on.

What I am after here is not an opinion about my idea. Opinions about ideas are polite by default: people tell you it sounds good because telling you otherwise would be rude. You take that “sounds good” home and file it as proof. It is not.

What I am after is what somebody already does without me. By hand, awkwardly, with nobody asking them to. That awkwardness is the one signal that does not know how to lie.

And there is a part that is hard to own up to. Your own excitement is the loudest voice in the room, and if you work alone there is nobody to turn it down. I distrust myself here more than anywhere else. Not because I cannot look — it is that I want the answer to be yes, and wanting something changes what you hear.

You know you are done when you can talk about specific people instead of profiles. It lasts less than it seems. There comes a point where you have stopped learning and started asking for permission.