The Lab

I washed my face with commercial bathroom soap late one night at the office. The kind of soap that requires you to pump the little lever 100 times to get anything more than a booger-sized amount.

It isn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me at work. But it was a pivotal moment all the same.

I’d been tasked with finishing a large-format poster for an event. Senior leadership feedback didn’t come in until around 6 PM, and we had an event early the next morning.

I had just a few hours to incorporate their changes and get a clean version ready to go.

I gradually said goodbye to everyone else in the office, and finished the final version of the file around 11 PM.

I hit Print.

Estimated time: just under two hours.

Blerg.

I could’ve filled those hours with something productive. I always had plenty on my plate. But it was 11 PM and I’d been there since 7:30 that morning. There was nothing left in any cognitive corner of my brain.

I tossed the multicolored office hacky-sack in the air a few times just to amuse myself. In those pre-instant-messaging days, we threw that hacky-sack over the cubicle walls at each other to signal “I need something from you” while on a phone call.

If you were lucky, it would land right square between your coworker and their keyboard. It was hard not to get excited about that.

I remember how lonely it felt sitting there that night. My family was most likely long gone to bed so a phone call was out. And I was the only one deep in the bowels of the building — which is where many companies like to keep their communicators, by the way.

Our office was in a former vault. So when I say I was in the bowels of the building, I mean that literally.

Like the parallel planner that I am, I started doing the math on the rest of my night.

It would probably be 1:30 or 2am before I got home. And the very last thing I’d want to do walking in the door, with my bed in such close proximity, would be to wash my face.

Here’s the only skin care tip I think actually works: I never go to bed without taking my makeup off. Never. Not ever. It’s the worst thing you can do to your face.

It’s not even a little negotiable.

Which is exactly what made this night a problem for me. Because for the first time, I was actually considering it.

All the conditioning from those splashy Noxema commercials as a teenager was starting to crumble.

I took a break to walk to the ladies room. While I was washing my hands, I stared at the soap dripping through my fingers and thought for a second.

I mean, at the end of the day, it’s a cleansing agent.

And given its probable chemical composition, it would most likely remove all traces of my makeup.

Commercial hand soap is not a good idea for an early-30s face. Pretty sure this one was neither hypoallergenic nor non-comedogenic. But it would get the job done.

And the only thing I’d have to do when I got home was drop into bed.

So I found some paper clips to hold my hair back and dove in — eye makeup and all. There was no going back now.

In a horror movie, this would’ve been the perfect time for the villain to arrive, weapon of my demise firmly in grasp. I would’ve had no clue.

I could feel the soap stripping the delicate oils from my skin in little ribbon drips, its sharp antibacterial fragrance a harsh reminder of its gritty duty.

I felt a little dirty.

As I dried my face with a fibrous and machine-hewn paper towel from yet another dispenser, I shook my head.

I just went there, I thought. If I was willing to do this once, I’d be more likely to stay this late again knowing I could always shortcut the process on the back end.

At this rate, how much longer would it be before I was using the hand dryer to do a full blowout on my hair after showering at the sink? I could stay at the office for a week.

The die had been cast.

But that was the only time I ever washed my face with hand soap at work.

Instead, the next day I made sure to pack a small overnight bag and kept it in my desk. Facial cleanser, moisturizer, a change of clothes, a few makeup extras, and some peanut butter crackers because I’m always hungry.

I didn’t have to give up my most basic rituals to this demanding job. I just had to get creative about keeping them.

That was the larger lesson from that season of my career. If I was going to learn from the best, I was going to have to change how I did things. Not ask them to do anything differently.

You don’t thrive and learn in a high-performance environment by abandoning what matters to you. You figure out creative ways to bring it with you.

When I finally left that role several years later, I felt like I’d been through the world’s toughest weedout class.

And later, when I found myself doing things that required real skill and resilience, I realized I hadn’t just developed those things in spite of those late nights. I’d developed them because of them.

It took me a few years to see how the demand in that season opened the door to my own belief in what I could really do.

That’s what Audacious Belief actually looks like.

You’re not always sure you can do it. But you do it anyway, because honestly, you’re the worst predictor of what you can actually do.

And eventually, you stop being surprised by what you’re capable of. I guess it took a wall-mounted soap dispenser to get that lesson in the books for me.

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