I Don't Know What I'm Doing

There’s a version of me that people see in meetings. He walks in with a direction already formed. He talks fast, connects dots quickly, and sounds like he’s three steps ahead. People assume that version of me has it figured out. That he sees the whole picture. That the confidence comes from certainty.

It doesn’t. It comes from something closer to the opposite.

How My Brain Actually Works

My brain doesn’t think in steps. It skips. I’ll be looking at a problem and suddenly I’m at the answer, or something that feels like the answer, without any memory of how I got there. The conclusion shows up first. The reasoning fills in after, if it fills in at all.

This is useful. It’s also disorienting. Because when someone asks me to explain how I arrived at a decision, I often can’t. Not because the decision is wrong. Usually it holds up. But the path from A to Z happened in a flash and I can’t reconstruct the middle letters. I just know where we need to go.

For a long time I thought this meant something was wrong with me. That real thinkers worked through problems methodically. That my way was just guessing with extra confidence. It took someone much smarter than me sitting me down and explaining that this is a recognizable pattern. Skip thinking. It’s a feature, not a bug. But it comes with baggage.

The Baggage

The biggest piece of baggage: you look more certain than you are. When you can articulate the endpoint clearly, people assume you’ve done the work to get there. You haven’t. You’ve seen the destination. The road between here and there is still fog.

This creates a weird dynamic. People trust your direction because you sound sure. But you’re running the same internal monologue as everyone else. Am I right? Is this actually good? What am I missing? The difference is you’ve learned not to let that monologue slow you down. You move anyway. Most of the time that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the gap between how confident you sounded and how wrong you were feels enormous.

I’ve gotten comfortable with this. Not because I’ve resolved it. Because I’ve accepted that the alternative is worse. The alternative is waiting until you’re certain before you act. And certainty, in anything worth doing, doesn’t exist.

Good Days and Bad Days

Here’s the part nobody talks about. The gap between my best days and my worst days is massive. On a good day, the skip thinking is firing. I can see connections nobody else sees. I can design a system in my head and have it halfway built by lunch. Those days feel like cheating.

On a bad day, the same brain that skips to answers skips to nothing. The fog doesn’t clear. The dots don’t connect. I sit at my desk and wonder if every good day was a fluke. Whether I’ve been coasting on pattern recognition and the patterns just stopped matching.

I used to think the bad days meant I was lazy. That with more discipline, every day could be a good day. I’ve stopped believing that. The inconsistency isn’t a failure of effort. It’s the cost of the wiring. You don’t get the leaps without the crashes. Trying to flatten it out, to be consistently medium, would kill the thing that makes the good days possible.

So I’ve learned to design around it. On good days, I do the hardest work. The architecture. The strategy. The decisions that require seeing around corners. On bad days, I do the work that doesn’t need spark. Emails. Admin. Cleanup. I used to fight the rhythm. Now I use it.

The Trap of Looking Like You Have It Figured Out

There’s a specific kind of trap that skip thinkers fall into. Because you pattern-match quickly, because you get to answers fast, people start treating you like you don’t need help. Like you already know. They stop offering context. They stop questioning your direction. They assume you’ve thought it through.

You haven’t. You’ve intuited it. And intuition without interrogation is just a guess that happens to feel good.

The best people I’ve worked with are the ones who push back. Not because they think I’m wrong, but because they force me to reconstruct the path. “How did you get there?” is the most useful question anyone can ask me. Half the time, when I try to explain, I find holes I didn’t see. The other half, the explanation solidifies something that was only instinct before.

I’ve learned to seek that out. To surround myself with people who aren’t impressed by speed and want to see the work. Not because I need approval, but because my own thinking gets better when someone makes me slow down and show it.

Why I’m Writing This

I write about building a lot. About moving fast, about designing things that work, about the bias toward action. All of that is true. But there’s a version of that story that sounds like someone who has it all mapped out, and I don’t want to sell that version because it’s not real.

The truth is messier. I operate on instinct more than analysis. I trust my gut before I trust the data, and most of the time my gut is right, but not always. My best days are really good and my worst days are genuinely unproductive. I’ve built real things, but I’ve also stared at a screen for hours unable to start.

I think the honest thing to say is: I don’t know what I’m doing. Not in the self-deprecating way people say it at networking events. In the literal sense. I rarely know the full path from where I am to where I’m going. I just know the destination, and I’ve gotten comfortable starting the walk before the map is drawn.

That’s not confidence. It’s tolerance for ambiguity. And I think it matters to say that out loud, because too many people wait for the map.

The map doesn’t come before you move. It draws itself while you walk.