Who Am I To _______?
The undersold genius you've been hiding from the world
Hello friend,
I sat in a cinema not long ago watching a documentary that left me... Unsettled.
The subject mattered. The filmmaker clearly cared about making a movie for the big screen. But the narrative was a mess, the key messages never landed, and I walked out feeling worse about the cause the film was meant to serve than before I’d walked in.
The last thing I want to feel about conservation is that despite best efforts and well-meaning intentions, the outcomes fail and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
In the Q&A afterwards, the director fielded questions with the confidence of someone who had just screened the film of their career. They talked about what seemed important to them: the fancy technology they used, how much it cost to make the film, and the fact that the film was making its rounds in the Southeast Asian film world.
I can’t help feeling like a massive mark has been missed - isn’t the point of a film to tell a story and take the audience on a compelling narrative arc? Or of a documentary to educate, change minds, restore hope, and inspire change?
I thought I’d walk out of the cinema feeling more knowledgeable about the topic, alarmed about how little progress has been made, or moved to making adjustments in my life to support the cause, no matter how small.
Why is it so easy for substandard work to be given a platform?
This is the phenomenon I can’t stop thinking about.
The Shoddiness We Keep Tolerating
Creators toot their half-baked ideas while people who actually have the goods to back themselves up stay hidden in the shadows, for fear of not being good enough, smart enough, plucky enough.
I’ve started calling them undersold geniuses, though the name is too tidy for what I mean.
They’re the ones quietly doing extraordinary work. Carrying expertise, taste and hard-won knowledge that other people would monetise without a second thought. And they hesitate. They wait until they’re “ready.” They wonder if they have enough to say. They think “Who am I to ______________________?”
And in the meantime, someone with half their ability has already built the platform, launched the thing, taken the stage.
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers: the part where we stop talking about them, and start talking about You.
