A First Guess, Not a Verdict

There's a specific kind of judgment I used to make quickly, almost without noticing I was making it — sizing someone up in my professional network and quietly deciding they didn't have much going on. Not dramatically. Just a fast, private verdict: not capable, not much potential, nothing worth paying closer attention to.

It usually happened with people I only knew at a surface level — a title, a role, the way they answered in a meeting, how confidently, or not, they carried themselves. I'd file them away in my head and move on.

Then, with a few of these same people, I actually started talking more. Not because I set out to test my first impression — just circumstance, more conversations over more time. And what I found kept surprising me. They had real skills. Skills I genuinely didn't have myself. It just hadn't been visible in whatever brief interaction I'd based my first judgment on.

Realizing this didn't feel good, if I'm honest. It sat somewhere between embarrassment and a quiet kind of guilt — I'd been confident in a verdict I'd handed out for free, about someone's ability, based on almost nothing. What stayed with me wasn't just that I'd been wrong. It was how sure I'd felt while I was wrong, and how little that confidence had actually been worth.

What also stayed with me was noticing why the skill hadn't been visible in the first place. Several of these people were doing a separate job entirely — something with a fixed, dependable monthly income — while the actual skill I was discovering sat quietly on the side, mostly unused. Not because they lacked the ability to build something around it. It seemed more like they'd chosen the safer, steadier path over showcasing or pursuing the thing they were actually good at.

I noticed the same thing happen somewhere else too, in a completely different setting. I'd see people exercising — form that looked off to me, movements that didn't match what I thought was "correct" — and somewhere in my head I'd already laughed at them and decided they were doing it wrong. It never occurred to me to just appreciate that they were showing up and putting in the effort at all, whatever their form looked like. Instead of noticing that, I went straight to finding where they were failing.

I don't think either of these was really about the other person. Stability is real, and not everyone can afford to bet on a skill instead of a paycheck. And showing up to move your body, imperfectly or not, still counts as showing up. But both times, it made me look again at my own quick judgments — how much of what I was calling "wrong" or "no potential" was really just "not visible to me in five minutes," and how little that five minutes actually told me about what someone was carrying underneath, or trying to do at all.

I still catch myself doing the quick sizing-up. I don't think that instinct goes away completely. But I try to hold it a little more loosely now — as a first guess, not a verdict.