I had a funny realization tonight. I was wondering whether I’m just… extra complicated. 😂
Maybe I notice too much. Feel too much. Track too many dimensions at once. Maybe I’m the one making life harder than it needs to be because I’m constantly examining what something means, what’s underneath it, what belongs to me, what belongs to someone else, what I’m learning, what pattern is repeating, what has changed…
You know. Casual Thursday in my brain. 😂 But then something clicked. Maybe complexity isn’t actually my problem.
I’ve spent more than twenty years in Product Management working with complex systems. Give me a giant messy problem with competing needs, dependencies, constraints, incomplete information, strong personalities, technical limitations, and no obvious answer…and somehow my brain gets very happy.
I don't make the complexity disappear. I find the architecture underneath it.
What actually matters?
What do we know?
What don't we know?
What assumptions are we making?
What is the smallest useful thing we can do next that gives us more information?
And then: Build something. Observe. Learn. Adjust. Repeat.
We stopped building good products with giant waterfall plans for exactly this reason. You can spend months designing the perfect solution based on what you think reality will be, only to discover that reality has other plans.
And apparently…I have sometimes been waterfall-planning my fucking life. 😂 Trying to understand the whole emotional system before making a decision. Trying to understand exactly why someone behaved the way they did.
Trying to determine whether something is attachment, incompatibility, fear, intuition, projection, grief, desire, an old wound, a growth edge—or some delightful cocktail of all of the above.
Trying to understand where a relationship is going before simply experiencing where it is. Trying to know who I am becoming before allowing myself to become her.
But humans are not static requirements. Neither are relationships. Neither is desire. Neither am I.
So lately, without really naming it, I think I've been practicing something different. A kind of agile human becoming.
What do I know now?
Not what can I theoretically know if I analyze this for another six hours.
- What do I actually know now?
- What matters now?
- Of everything I'm noticing, what is signal?
- What requires my attention in this iteration?
- What's the next right action?
Not the forever decision. Not the five-year relational architecture. Not the final answer. Just the next action that feels aligned with what I currently know.
And then… Learn.
Let reality give me more information. Let another conversation happen. Let someone show me more of who they are. Let my body respond. Let myself change my mind.
Let iteration two be informed by iteration one instead of demanding that iteration one somehow predict iteration ten.
There is something incredibly freeing about this. Because it means I don't have to reduce my complexity in order to find simplicity.
I can honor all of it—the contradictions, nuances, desires, fears, intelligence, body signals, history, intuition—and still create an elegant architecture for movement.
Maybe that's what clarity actually is. Not having resolved every variable. Just having enough relationship with myself to know what matters next.
And perhaps this is another expression of surrender. Surrendering the need to know where something ends before allowing myself to enter it. Surrendering certainty without surrendering discernment. Surrendering the master plan while staying deeply awake to the data.
I've known how to do this with products for decades. Apparently I'm finally learning how to do it with myself.
Ship. Observe. Integrate. Iterate. Become.
And maybe there was never supposed to be a final version anyway.