The ten minutes before

The presentation is at nine. You’ve read the deck four times, you know the numbers, and there is nothing useful left to prepare. What’s left is ten minutes and a mirror.

Nobody tells you that this is the hard part. Not the work — you did the work. The hard part is the small gap between finishing the preparation and walking in, where your brain helpfully offers you a list of everything that could go badly.

Skincare doesn’t fix that. Anyone who tells you a serum will make you brave is selling you something. What it does is give your hands a job for two minutes while the rest of you catches up, and it means that when you do look in the mirror, you look like yourself on a good day rather than yourself at the end of a long week.

That’s a small thing. Small things at nine in the morning are not nothing.