My high school math department used to laugh about it. I’d score near perfect on the test and get a failing grade on communication, because I did all of it in my head and wouldn’t write the steps. I’ve had an allergy to showing my work my whole life. If writing it down felt like a waste, I didn’t bother.
That was fine when I was the only one in the company. It all lived in my head and that was the system. Then I hired people, and my head and my inbox quietly became the single point of failure. Someone on the team admitted he’d been playing the bus game, the morbid little thought experiment of whether this place survives if I get hit by a bus. He wasn’t confident it would.
I’d told myself a story about it, that holding everything was me protecting people from the grunt work. Some weird paternal instinct. It wasn’t protection. It was a bottleneck, and it was stopping me from being any good at the actual job. People want to help carry it. You just have to be willing to show the work and let them.
What are you holding in your head because showing it feels like a waste, or a risk?