I’ve spent close to twenty years in data, and a lot of that time on project work. Some of it high profile. On the ones I led, I wasn’t a manager — I was the technical subject matter expert, which meant I wasn’t responsible for anyone’s paycheck but I was responsible for the work packages going out the door.
That distinction matters less than it sounds like it should.
When everything runs clean, I look good. When it doesn’t, the people doing the work get looked at, and then everyone looks at me, because I’m the one who reviewed it. I’m the one who signed off. Multiple points of failure, one name at the bottom.
So when something got past me — when work went out and around before I could catch it — I didn’t just have a quality problem. I had damage control. Remediation. And then the harder part, which is sitting down with a person and having the conversation nobody wants to have, sometimes more than once, focused on solving the issue.
It always worked out. That’s not the point. The point is that I learned a long time ago that my name is the thing I’m actually trading on, and everything that goes out under it is a withdrawal or a deposit.
I’ve been telling myself I have a camera problem.
I don’t have a problem with my face being attached to things. I don’t have a problem standing in front of a room. I’ve given a lot of speeches to a lot of people and I like doing it. Put me on a stage and I’m fine.
So the anxiety around shooting video for the book has been confusing to me, right up until I put it next to the sign-off.
I’m old school enough that if I’m going to put something on video, I want to be saying something helpful and true — something I’d sign. And what I’ve noticed is that the videos come easy when I’m talking about the book. The characters, the writing process, why I made a choice. I can vouch for all of it. I wrote it. I know exactly what’s in there.
Where I freeze is the stuff where I haven’t finished the thinking yet. Where the message is still four-fifths formed and I can feel the soft spot in it. My mouth knows it before my head does.
That’s not fear of the lens. That’s my sign-off reflex firing correctly.
Which means I’ve been solving for the wrong thing. I kept trying to get comfortable on camera, and comfortable was never the variable. Vouchable was.
If I can’t stand behind it, I shouldn’t be the one selling it. If I want to be able to shoot the video, the work isn’t in the video — it’s upstream, in getting the message clear enough that I’d put my name at the bottom without flinching.
And I’ve been doing that for twenty years. Just not for myself.
There’s a version of this I don’t love admitting. Some of the videos I’ve avoided weren’t avoided because the message was unclear. They were avoided because clarifying it would have taken an afternoon I didn’t want to give it, and “I’m not comfortable on camera” is a much more flattering sentence than “I haven’t done the work yet.”
I signed off on a lot of other people’s work over the years and never once thought it was strange to be accountable for something I didn’t personally build.
The camera just asks the same question, pointed the other direction.
David Willis 