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The Red Thread This Week:
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." — Kurt Vonnegut
My wife and I both waited tables when we were younger. In different places and at different points in our life, but the job was essentially the same.
And anyone who’s worked in food service knows it’s a uniquely tough, but rewarding gig; we tell our kids all the time there’s no faster way to learn what professional work actually requires of you, than to spend a summer carrying plates for tips.
The best servers I ever worked with understood something that took me a while to fully wrap my head around.
Their job was not to show up as their full, complicated self every shift. Their job was to show up as the version of themselves the table needed for the next 90 minutes. Warm. Present. Calibrated to the room.
The servers who struggled wore their day on their sleeves. The breakup, the rent stress, the fight with the kitchen. They confused being a person with being a server. And it showed up in their tips and feedback.
The customers weren't asking for an “authentic” version of their server to show up alongside their dinner.
They were asking for the promise of the job to be kept.
The food on time. The check at the right moment. A pleasant 90 minutes that they paid for.
I think about that 90min promise a lot, because somewhere along the way our culture turned "authentic" into a cheat code. A magic word that sells products, builds personal brands, and gives almost anyone permission to behave however they want.
“Well, I’m just being my true, authentic self. Sorry you can’t handle that.”
It’s strange, and it’s got us sideways in more than a few areas.
And it definitely makes it harder to build anything that actually serves the people you said you'd serve.
So the Red Thread this week is about that word. About the double meaning it carries. And about why it's become an incredibly expensive (and weak) permission slip in our culture.
~ Jaime
🔑 The Unlock
Two Different Things Held in One Word
There are 2 completely separate ideas nested inside the word "authentic," and most people use the word without considering which one they mean.
The 1st is authenticity of self.
The internal alignment between what you do, and who you believe you are.
Whether you can live with the work you put into the world.
Whether the path you're walking matches the person you're trying to become.
Authenticity of self matters a lot. If your job is to market vape pens to teenagers and you don't want to be a vape pen marketer, quit. Our modern capitalistic/industrial economy is here and it’s not likely to be unwound any time soon.
Your job is to find a path through it that you can live with. Otherwise, life can feel empty pretty fast.
But authenticity of self is your problem. It's not your audience's problem, or your customer’s problem.
The 2nd idea, which we almost never talk about, is authenticity of the work.
Authenticity of work is whether the thing keeps the promise the thing was supposed to keep.
Whether the dish that arrives at the table matches the dish on the menu.
Whether the surgery is performed correctly.
Whether the app loads and does the task you’ve asked it to do.
The clearest way I've heard it put: the work shows the hand of the creator, but it is not about the creator, or the creator's mood.
The work you do has its own integrity, separate from yours.
In the years since the arrival of digital and social media, the culture has started using authenticity of self as a substitute for authenticity of work.
As if showing up "as your authentic self" is the same thing as keeping the promise. Or as if “being real” is a replacement for doing the job.
1. The Surgeon Test
A few years ago I had hernia surgery.
Here's what I did not want from my surgeon that day: I didn't want him to show up as his full, authentic self. I didn't want to know how his morning went. I didn't want him processing his feelings about his ex-wife while he had his hands on the scalpel. I didn't want to hear about his journey.
I wanted him to be the best surgeon he could be for the hour or so he was working on me. I wanted him to keep the promise his profession had made on his behalf. I wanted authenticity of work, not authenticity of self.
This isn't a weird ask. We make it of every professional in our lives. The accountant at tax time. The contractor renovating the kitchen. The teacher on a Monday morning. The pilot on the flight home.
Nobody finds this offensive when we say it about surgeons or pilots. We only get squirrelly or defensive about it when we start applying it to ourselves.
2. Authenticity as a Permission Slip
Open any social platform for 10 minutes and count how many times someone is "just being real."
The pundit whose hot take is engineered down to the syllable for maximum spread, but they're "just keeping it honest."
The personality whose entire brand is the loudest version of themselves available, but they're "just being authentic."
The public figure whose calculated rawness has made them millions of dollars, but they want you to know they're "just telling it like it is."
The social media platforms didn't invent this, but they made it a full time job.
The algorithm has no opinion on whether you're being “real” in good faith or performing cruelty and outrage as a strategy. It just measures engagement. And engagement rewards a specific kind of behavior; a little sharper than most in-person, public rooms would allow. A little more incendiary than the moment requires.
A little more of an "I don't care what anyone thinks" posture, prioritized over what's actually true.
After all, rage and coarseness travel pretty well online, compared to measured, thoughtful response.
So a generation of public communicators learned the trick. Perform at the edges, for the fringes. Claim it’s authenticity driving the bus. Collect the attention.
And when anyone questions the behavior, retreat behind the word. “I'm just being me, just being authentic.”
It's brilliant cover because the word is pretty bulletproof. Nobody can really prove you're NOT being your authentic self. The accusation isn’t very sticky.
But you're probably not a pundit.
You're a builder, a leader, a creator doing real work for real people. But remember, the same incentive structure shaping the pundits is operating on you, every time you open a platform to post something.
A lot of the time, "I'm just being authentic" is just Latin for I don't want to be on the hook for serving anyone but myself.
It might feel like artistic integrity, or courage on display, but it's usually just fear of accountability blessed by your marketing team.
3. The Hand, Not the Mood
You can see or feel the hand of the maker in great work, and that’s a good thing. A great novel reads like the novelist wrote it. A great meal tastes like the chef prepared it. A great movie plays like a specific director filmed it, not a committee.
Being able to sense the hand that made a thing is part of what makes the work feel alive and meaningful, instead of generic/hollow.
But the hand of the maker is not the mood of the maker.
The hand is the craft, the taste, the choices, the voice. The mood is whatever is happening inside the maker on a given Tuesday.
The hand belongs in the work. The mood belongs somewhere else.
Confusing the two is the move at the center of all this.
Treating "I'm in a mood today" as the reason it’s OK for your work to be all about you, and not serve your audience.
Treating "this is just how I am" as the reason your work doesn't have to keep its promise to your customers.
Treating your inner state as a builder, or leader as something your audience signed up to absorb.
They didn't. They signed up for the work.
💡 Mindset Shift
Your Customers Didn’t Sign Up for Your Mood
Your audience signed up for the work you do. They hired you to keep a promise.
None of them signed a contract that obligates them to care about your authentic state on any given Tuesday, and their patience for whether you deliver is finite.
Their patience for hearing about why you didn't is even more finite.
The opposite of hiding behind authenticity is empathy.
The kind of strategic empathy that requires you to actually think about the person on the other end of the work. What they need. What they came for. What they were promised. What would make this worth their time.
That's not soft. That's actually the discipline. It's the thing that separates the server who pays their rent on tips from the server who blames the table for not appreciating their authentic self.
You are not the point of the meal. The table is the point of the meal.
This isn't a call to suppress yourself. Authenticity of self matters. Protect it. Honor it. If the path you're walking is wrong or not serving you, change the path.
But once you've chosen the path, the work is the work.
The professional is able to hold both at once.
To be a person, with a life, with good days and hard days.
And to also do the job you said you were going to do.
🎲 Prompt Playground
The Authenticity Audit
Use this to figure out where you might be hiding behind the word.
Copy + paste this prompt into your AI tool of choice:
You are a strategic advisor helping me audit where I might be using "authenticity" as cover for not doing the harder thing.
My Context:
What I do: [your business or creative work]
Who I serve: [your audience or customers]
A recent decision I justified as "true to who I am" or "authentic to my brand": [describe it honestly]
Help me evaluate:
Was that decision protecting real internal alignment, or was it avoiding accountability for whether the work serves the people I'm trying to serve? Be direct.
What promise have I made to the people I serve? Am I keeping it, or am I letting "authenticity" excuse me from keeping it?
Where am I confusing self-expression with the job?
If the most respected professional in my field watched what I just shipped, would they see authenticity of work, or someone hiding behind their personality?
What's one decision this week where the more empathetic, less self-centered move would also be the more professional one?
Be direct. No hype. Tell me what I need to hear.
Ask me one question at a time, in order, until you have enough information to give me a real audit.
⚡ Before You Go
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Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here.
~ Jaime