The Streak Tells On You

A streak on glass is a confession. It says someone was here, someone tried, and someone quit a half-second before the job was actually done. You catch it at a slant of light you didn’t plan for, a smear across the windshield in exactly the spot your eyes want to go. The glass was cleaned. That’s the insult of it. The effort was spent. The streak is just what’s left when the effort was about getting done instead of getting it done right.

Streaks are the marks you leave by accident and would take back if you could. They sit entirely inside your control, which is why they sting. Nobody forces a streak on you. You leave it by hurrying, by half-caring, by wiping in one direction and calling it clean.

Footprints are a different thing entirely. You leave them by walking. You don’t arrange them, you can’t reach back and tilt one so it photographs better, and the good ones, the ones that mean anything, you don’t even know you left. By the time someone finds them, you’re already somewhere else.

This is where it should bother you a little.

Brands spend most of their budget on footprints they will never get to place. So they stage them. They pour wet concrete in the lobby, press their own hand into it, and call it culture. They write the press release about their impact before any impact has happened. All that managed, polished, on-message effort to be remembered a particular way is not a footprint. It’s a streak. The residue of trying too hard, smeared right across the part of the glass everyone has to look through.

A company I used to work for just won a serious award for their AI. A real one, the kind the people in the room actually respect. I wrote the submission. I also submitted it, which sounds like nothing until you’ve done it. The work was a slog. Chasing people for reviews. Coaxing engineers to talk about the thing we were building in terms of where it was headed instead of where it happened to be that particular Tuesday. Turning an unfinished vision into a sentence a judge would believe. I had all but forgotten I did any of it.

Then they won. And the people who know where to look can see my footprints all through that submission. I didn’t stage them. I couldn’t have. By the time the award landed I’d long since walked on to other things, and that’s the only reason it felt like anything at all. The footprint you end up proudest of is almost always the one you forgot you were leaving, because you were too busy doing the work (the hard work, the frustrating work, the work no one else wants to do, mind you) to stop and pose beside it.

That’s the whole trick, and it refuses to behave like a trick.

You cannot author your impact. You can only author your carelessness.

Best to spend your attention where you actually hold the pen. Wipe the glass right. Do the forgettable, unglamorous labor well enough that it leaves a clean surface behind you. Then let go of how you’ll be remembered, because that was never in your hands, and the harder you grab at it the worse it smears.

The footprints take care of themselves, or they don’t. Either way they were never yours to place. Your job was always the wiping.

Stay Positive & Streaks Are Inevitable, Footprints Are A Choice