Share it before you're sure

At my last job, at a bigger company, I cared a lot about how people saw me. I wanted to look different from everyone else. I wanted to be the smart one, the person who always had the right answer.

One way I did that was entrepreneurship. Outside of work I was deep into it. I read and watched everything Y Combinator put out, and I learned a lot about building companies and working well.

Then I mostly kept it to myself.

Why I kept it

Knowing something my teammates didn't made me feel special. If I'd picked up a better way to do something, I used it, and I let it make me look good. If I'd shared it, everyone would have known it, and I'd have lost my edge.

That felt good. It also meant my team was working with worse information than I had, on purpose, so I could stay a step ahead of people who were supposed to be on my side.

What changed

Over the last couple of years I've let that go. A lot of it I learned from the first CEO of OpenDate.

The idea is simple: a team where everyone has the best possible knowledge beats a team where one person is ahead. I'd rather we all win together than have me be the one who knows the trick.

So now, as soon as I find a better way of working, I share it. And I don't share it as an announcement. I want people to try it, poke holes in it and push back. If it holds up, we should all be working that way. If it doesn't, we drop it.

Letting go of being right

Part of this has been letting go of my need to be right.

I used to only bring an idea forward once I was sure it was good, because a wrong idea would hurt the image I was building. Now I'm fine proposing something half-baked. Sometimes it's a bad idea. Someone tells me so, I change my mind, and we move on. I'm not afraid of that anymore.

That turns out to matter as much as the sharing. If I only share what I'm sure of, I share late and I share less. The half-baked version is the one that gets better when other people get their hands on it.

The ironic part

Here's what I didn't expect: sharing everything ends up setting you apart anyway. When you're the person who keeps bringing new ways of working to the team, people notice. It differentiates you, almost by accident.

But that's not why I do it. I do it because I want to work with people who are all on the same page, using the best, most up-to-date way of working we can find. That's a much better place to be than a step ahead of everyone, alone.