The best story I never told

For most of my twenties the plan was simple: I wanted a career like my father's. One company, a steady climb, the kind of work you can explain at a family dinner without anyone asking a follow-up question. So I joined Philip Morris in sales, and I took to it. The role was designed to take two to three years. I finished it in one, with numbers I was genuinely proud of.

Then an assignment came up in Curaçao, a short-term posting to launch a project on the island. The requirements asked for five years of experience. I had one, and on paper I met none of the other criteria either. I remember thinking, quite clearly, fuck it, I'm going to apply anyway.

Instead of the usual one-page CV, I sent a short video explaining in my own words why I was the right person for it, along with a visual résumé that showed rather than listed what I had done. It went to the top of the pile, I got the job, and what was meant to be six months turned into more than a year because the project worked.

By any measure it is a good story: a young employee talks his way into a role he isn't qualified for, using a format nobody else thought to try, and then delivers. For the company it would have been an easy, human piece of employer branding. For me it would have been the kind of story people remember you by.

I told no one.

Nobody stopped me

What I only admitted to myself much later is that nothing prevented me from sharing it. There was no policy against it, no compliance officer waiting to intervene, no message from communications asking me to stay quiet. I was allowed to talk about it, and I simply didn't.

I was working in tobacco, and that alone made me cautious in a way I never examined: unsure what people would think, worried about saying the wrong thing, more comfortable keeping my head down than putting my name to something. The restriction I felt was real, but I had built it myself.

A quiet cost

I have since come to think this is one of the most common and least discussed patterns in working life. In banks, pharmaceutical companies, insurers, energy firms and public institutions, there are people doing remarkable work who never mention it. Partly out of caution, and partly because, from the inside, their own work rarely looks remarkable. Curaçao didn't feel like a story to me at the time; it felt like the job. The people closest to the work are often the worst judges of what is interesting about it, and the ones with the best material tend to be the quietest.

That silence has a cost, even if it never shows up on a balance sheet. For the individual, it is a reputation that could have been built simply by describing what they already do. For the organisation it is something larger. People increasingly trust other people more than they trust institutions, and a leader explaining a decision in their own words will usually be heard where a company announcement is not. Every expert who stays silent is a story the organisation has, in effect, already paid for and never told.

What I would do now

If I could go back, I would write about it. Not a polished announcement, just an honest account: I applied for a job I wasn't qualified for, I tried something different, and this is what happened. It wouldn't have needed to be perfect. It would only have needed to exist.

That realisation has shaped a lot of what I do now, and it is a large part of why Ripple exists. But mostly it has changed how I look at the people around me. When I meet someone who has done something genuinely interesting and says nothing about it, I no longer assume they have nothing to say. More often they are standing exactly where I stood, inside a cage nobody else built.

— Joost