Why do we only celebrate the underdog after they win?

We love an underdog once we know the ending.

We make movies about the founder who ignored conventional wisdom, the artist nobody understood, the athlete nobody believed in, the scientist who kept asking an inconvenient question. Their refusal to conform becomes the evidence that they were extraordinary all along.

Real life is less generous.

Before the outcome validates them, those same qualities can appear to be poor judgment. Being different can be interpreted as being difficult. Questioning an accepted process can become combativeness. Trying something nobody else is doing can look embarrassing. Talking openly about an unfinished idea can look performative.

Then, if enough people eventually follow, we tend to rename the exact same behavior leadership.

I find that gap fascinating.

We have edited the middle out of the story

Most stories about unconventional people are told backward. We already know they succeed, so every strange decision becomes foreshadowing.

Real life has no narrator telling everyone which weird person is in Act Two of an inspirational movie. There is simply a person doing something unusual, with no guarantee it will work.

That is the part I think we have culturally become uncomfortable watching.

We celebrate entrepreneurship, originality, authenticity, and bold ideas in theory. In practice, doing something meaningfully different usually requires behaving differently before anyone has given you social permission to do so. There may be very little engagement. People may misunderstand what you are doing. Relationships can change. Professional choices have consequences. Some ideas will fail publicly.

That is not an unfortunate detour on the way to the interesting part.

That is the interesting part.

The uncertainty is what gives an underdog story its meaning. Otherwise, it is simply a story about someone who won.

I have had a lot of practice being the new girl

I did not arrive at this philosophy through my profession.

I had an unusually high amount of instability very early in life. I grew up with limited resources and limited access to the kinds of opportunities that make childhood feel predictable. From kindergarten through high school graduation, I attended eleven different schools. In third grade alone, I attended three.

Eleven versions of being the new girl teaches you some things.

You learn to observe quickly. You learn that every environment has rules nobody bothered to write down. You learn which parts of yourself make people comfortable and which do not. You also eventually learn that changing yourself every time the room changes is an exhausting way to live.

Standing out stopped feeling particularly dangerous to me because I had so much practice doing it.

Over time, I developed a simple operating assumption: if I am experiencing something that feels strange, lonely, or difficult to articulate, statistically I am probably not the only person experiencing it.

So sometimes I am willing to be the weird one for us.

Not because every unusual thought deserves an audience. Not because being different automatically makes someone right. And certainly not because public vulnerability is inherently virtuous.

Sometimes saying the thing out loud simply gives another person permission to recognize something they already knew.

That has always seemed useful enough to justify a little embarrassment.

Building in public is not the same as performing in public

There is a legitimate criticism buried inside the discomfort people have with public building.

The internet has blurred the distinction between doing something and documenting yourself doing something. Personal branding can become performance remarkably quickly. Entrepreneurship can become content. Transparency can become another marketing strategy.

I am aware of that every time I post something unfinished.

But I think the distinction is fairly simple: the public part should remain accountable to the work.

I am not building Groundtruth 911 so that I have something to talk about online. I am talking about Groundtruth 911 while I build it because the conversation improves what I am building.

I can expose an assumption before I spend months designing around it. Someone with different institutional knowledge can tell me where I am wrong. A person who has solved a similar problem can contribute context I do not have. Someone watching quietly may recognize a problem they thought only they were encountering.

And people can see my reasoning change.

That last part matters to me.

We are surrounded by polished case studies written after the outcome is known. I am much more interested in documenting how decisions actually develop: the first idea, the criticism, the thing I misunderstood, the revision, the part that worked, the thing that absolutely did not.

Institutional knowledge does not appear fully formed. It accumulates.

I want the record to show that.

I also discovered that identity can be designed intentionally

There is another reason I am doing this publicly, and it is much more personal.

For most of my life, I had a very rich internal identity and a much more constrained external one. I knew myself quite well internally, but translating that person into the visible world was harder.

Recently, I started treating that translation almost like a design problem.

I built a personal style guide. I chose colors. I defined how I want my work to sound and look. I became more intentional about what I buy, what I make, what I publish, and what I say yes to. In the most absurdly corporate description possible, I essentially developed brand governance for my own existence.

And, strangely enough, it has been one of the healthiest things I have ever done.

Not because I created a prettier version of myself. The opposite.

Creating an external structure forced me to become precise about what was already there.

What do I value? What do I actually believe? What am I very good at? Where am I deficient? What am I working toward? What aesthetics genuinely make me happy? Which parts of my personality do I keep softening because I think they will be easier for others to accept?

The goal was not consistency for consistency's sake.

It was coherence.

The distance between my internal and external identities became smaller.

That feels remarkably freeing.

Authenticity is useful beyond the self

I think we sometimes talk about authenticity as though it is primarily an individual wellness practice: be yourself because it will make you happier.

It has certainly made me happier.

But I think authenticity also has a community function.

Human beings take cues from one another about what is safe to say, try, wear, question, build, and become. Someone has to provide the first piece of evidence that departing from the norm will not kill you.

Then someone else moves a little.

Then someone else does.

Kindness works this way too. So does curiosity. So does courage.

I genuinely believe those things are more contagious than we give them credit for.

That does not mean I expect everyone to like what I am doing. I am sure that, depending on the observer and the day, I will be perceived as brave, cringe, thoughtful, embarrassing, difficult, generous, performative, ambitious, naive, or some combination of all of them.

Those interpretations do not change the work very much.

I know what I am trying to build. I know where I am still learning. I know what kind of community member I want to be while I build it.

That is enough information to keep moving.

So I am leaving the middle in

I do not know the ending of the Groundtruth 911 story yet.

That is precisely why I think this is the part worth documenting.

Maybe some ideas will become products. Some will probably disappear entirely. I will make decisions I later reverse. I will learn things publicly that someone else already knew. There will certainly be things I look back on and wish I had done differently.

Good.

That is what building something actually looks like.

If this proves successful, I do not want to retroactively construct a mythology in which every decision was intentional, every instinct was correct, and I somehow knew the destination from the beginning.

I didn't.

I know the direction. I know my values. I know the problems I care enough about to keep working on.

The rest is being built.

And if watching me be uncertain, different, overly earnest, occasionally wrong, or a little weird makes one other person more willing to build the thing they cannot stop thinking about, then being the weird one for us was worth it.

A note on the bigger picture

This is a personal philosophy, but some of the underlying ideas have also been studied more formally. Research on authentic self-expression, self-disclosure, and social connection suggests that greater congruence between who we are internally and how we express ourselves externally is associated with greater well-being and stronger social support.

For further reading:

• Bailey, E. R., Matz, S. C., Youyou, W., & Iyengar, S. S. (2020). Authentic self-expression on social media is associated with greater subjective well-being. Nature Communications.
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33024115/
• Luo, M., & Hancock, J. T. (2020). Self-disclosure and social media: motivations, mechanisms and psychological well-being. Current Opinion in Psychology.
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31563107/