Tomorrow I am going to tell you what I got wrong. Today, the other ledger — because a woman about to turn fifty is allowed to admit, out loud, that some of her calls were excellent.
We are trained, especially as women, to be fluent in our failures and shy about our wins. I am declining that training today. Here are the decisions I would make again in a heartbeat.
I refused to become someone else.
The pressure was lifelong and it came dressed in good advice: speak up more, network more, be more social, soften this, perform that. I heard it all and quietly kept being myself — the quiet, deep, allergic-to-small-talk maker of things. It was the least dramatic decision on this list and the most important. Everything else on this page was only possible because the person making the decisions stayed intact.
I insisted on the room.
At seventeen, my parents preferred that I commute to university. I fought for campus — for the independence, the full experience. And in that room I got, I renamed myself, found my people, and stepped out of the audience. I have been insisting on rooms ever since: Maryland, the founder programme, the corridors after they took my desk. Get yourself into the room where your becoming can happen. Nobody hands it to you.
I kept choosing challenge over comfort.
The vacation I never returned from. The visitor’s visa gamble. Leaving an established American life for a Kenya I no longer knew. Leaving employment for a startup idea I had not yet formed. Every one of these looked reckless from the outside and obvious from the inside. A quarter century later, the pattern is undeniable: I have never once regretted choosing the harder, more interesting room. Not once.
I told the truth when lying was available.
Six weeks pregnant, standing in front of a department head who had just said he could not take another pregnant woman — I told him anyway. It cost me the offer, for a few days. It preserved something I have never had to rebuild: the ability to be trusted, including by myself. Integrity is expensive in the moment and absurdly cheap over a lifetime.
I kept the friends who chose me.
Barbara. Elizabeth. Maggie. Wairimu. I did not collect people; I kept the ones who walked toward the quiet girl and stayed. Three and four decades later, they remain. If you have even two friendships like that, you are wealthy. I said what I said.
I kept the faith — and let it grow up.
I did not just inherit it and I did not discard it. I let it mature from rule-keeping into being held, from a lever for results into a place to stand when results refused to come. In the hardest season, that grown-up faith is what has kept the lights on.
I kept building.
Through every role, season, and setback — the certifications nobody asked for, the skills learned at night, the blog, the ventures, the prototypes. The building never stopped, and it means that at fifty I am not a woman wondering if she still has it. I am a woman mid-project, as always.
And I started this series.
Fifty visibility reps for a woman built to watch from the wings. It may be the most out-of-character right decision on the list — which is exactly why I am proud of it.
Here is what I notice, reading the list back.
Not one of these was right because it worked out — several took years to pay off, and some cost me dearly first. They were right because they were true to something: to who I am, to what I value, to the person I answer to. The outcomes, as always, had other shareholders. The decisions were mine.
That is my definition of getting it right, at almost-fifty: not choosing what wins, but choosing what is true, and letting the wins arrive on their own schedule.
They usually do.
And tomorrow — because honesty runs in both directions — the other list.
Come back tomorrow for Day 17: things I got wrong.
Sign the guestbook
Leave me a birthday note, tell me which post was your favourite, or share your own way to shine. I read every one.
