Badass

I remember the moment, many years ago, when I realized I didn’t have to be a badass.

There’s a pervasive myth within the world of entrepreneurship—and within many adjacent sub-cultures—that in order to succeed, you have to be hard, have to be ruthless, have to be borderline sociopathic.

This truism is reinforced by the people we tend to celebrate, the stories we tell, and the lessons we teach both consciously and unconsciously about what “success” looks like.

For a long time, I tried to fake...