Not intentionally. At least I don’t think so.

I usually start by doing the job I was hired to do. Then I notice something missing. A gap no one owns. An idea that keeps getting passed between teams because it doesn’t sit neatly inside anyone’s title. That is normally the point when I should probably mind my own business. Instead, I start building. A process. A point of view. A team, if I’m lucky. Sometimes an entirely new function.

This happened at Under Armour. I wasn’t hired to build a styling team. There wasn’t some grand plan for one either. I just kept noticing how disconnected everything felt. The product was doing one thing. The campaigns were doing another. The athletes sometimes felt like a completely separate conversation. There wasn’t a real point of view holding any of it together.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. I got a little hooked on making it better. Or maybe I just have a hard time leaving shit alone once I think I can fix it. Probably both.

So I started finding my way into projects that weren’t exactly mine. Helpful? Probably. Annoying? Also probably. Eventually, people started asking me before I had the chance. That got out of hand pretty quickly. There is probably someone reading this who remembers it differently. That’s fine.

One project became another. Then another. And somewhere in there, without really deciding to, I wasn’t just helping with the styling anymore. I was building the thing. Although it definitely didn’t feel like I was building a thing at the time.

It was trying something, seeing where it broke and trying it again. Convincing people to believe in work they had not seen yet. Doing the work while also explaining why the work should exist. Sometimes repeatedly. Actually, a lot of the time repeatedly.

This is the part people tend to clean up when they tell the story later. Once something exists, it starts to look inevitable. The title makes sense. The team makes sense. The process is sitting in a deck somewhere with arrows pointing in the right direction. None of it felt inevitable while it was happening.

But slowly, the thing started to take shape. There were bigger productions. More athletes. More people trusting us with the way they would be seen. Eventually, there were moments when the idea stopped feeling like something I was pushing uphill and started feeling like part of how the brand worked.

Then came the title. The team. The acknowledgment that the thing had become real. That part felt good. Obviously. But I’m not sure it was ever the part I liked most.

I think I like the beginning. Or maybe “like” is the wrong word. I complain through quite a bit of it. The lack of resources. The constant explaining. The part where you are doing three jobs while trying to convince someone the first job exists. But apparently complaining and enjoying something are not mutually exclusive.

The beginning is uncomfortable. It is usually under-resourced. You are doing the work before anyone has officially asked you to do it. You become responsible for problems you could have easily pretended not to notice. And you spend a lot of time creating structure while standing inside something that has absolutely no structure.

Why would anyone like that? I don’t know. But there is something about the stage when an idea is still mostly instinct. When I can see it clearly enough to believe in it, but not clearly enough to explain every part of it yet. Maybe that is confidence. Maybe it is impatience. There is probably a less flattering version where I just make things harder for myself.

Because once something is working, I start noticing the next thing. I’ve wondered if I should be better at leaving things alone.

There is a version of a career where you step into something established, learn the system and become very good at operating within it. A title that already makes sense. A team that already exists. A budget that does not begin with “let me see what I can do.” Some days that sounds fucking incredible.

But when I look back, most of the decisions that changed my life started without much certainty. I moved to a new city for a job I had not actually been offered. I found my way into a career I didn’t know existed when I started. Years later, I built a function I had never been hired to build.

None of those decisions looked particularly logical at the beginning. I’m not even sure they were. They only make sense now because I kept going. Which is convenient. It lets me tell the story like I knew what I was doing the whole time. I did not.

And now, apparently, I’m doing it again.

This time there is no company around the idea. No existing role to stretch beyond. No one to hand me a title once the work becomes big enough. Just the work I know how to do. The work I want to do more of. And the belief that there might be a better way to put it all together.

Some days that feels freeing. Other days I would really appreciate the guide I spent years making for everyone else.

But I know how this goes. I see something that could exist. I try to leave it alone.

Then I start building.