On Raising Your Hand

“just fucking rip it ask all the questions raise ur hand when u dont know listen read long term baby trust the process”

Written as a brief to her own system, September 28, 2026. Lowercase and punctuation as typed.

That is one line, typed fast, four weeks into business school. It reads like a pep talk and it is closer to a specification. Every clause in it has a longer version somewhere in a year of her own recordings, said to interns, to colleagues, to classmates, and to a room of strangers on a Wednesday. This page collects the longer versions, counts the one phrase that appears more than any other, and ends with the question the brief actually asks: which of these six belong in the constitution that runs her system, and at what rank.

The order is hers. The hand comes first because it is the physical act the others depend on. The question is what the hand is for. “I don’t know” is what the hand says. Listening is the hand going back down. The long view is how long you keep it up. The lake is the one that is not about the hand at all.

“I think honestly maybe it was just like I was willing to engage and like meet them where they were … I think that I was the first person to just like keep raising my hand. And I think once we built that culture, it made people just less skeptical about what the content was.”

Said to a classmate after a leadership program session, September 24, 2026.

The claim inside that sentence is causal and specific. A first-year leadership program had facilitators the cohort found amateurish, and the content was the same in every section. In hers, one person kept raising a hand, the room copied the posture, and the skepticism about the material fell. The hand did not improve the slides. It changed what the room was willing to do with them.

The mechanism is one that shows up all over her record: someone goes first, and the going first is the thing that makes the second person safe. The loneliness page makes the same argument with the Booth conversation studies, where the first unpolished disclosure is what corrects everyone else’s forecast of the room. A raised hand is the classroom version. It is cheap, visible, and it changes the base rate for everyone who can see it.

“That’s why you do it. And guess what? Whereas before, he still kind of fucking shit up. But he is asking questions now. He is not sitting in it.”

Said during a mentorship conversation about an intern, June 30, 2026.

“Not sitting in it” is the outcome she was tracking. Not the error rate, which was still there, but whether the person was stuck alone with the error or had raised a hand. On that reading, the hand is the leading indicator and the mistake count is the lagging one.

“There are no dumb questions at the beginning of a case. There are dumb questions at the end of the case, because at that point, your manager has developed expectations, other people on the team have developed expectations.”

Teaching a communications session for new analysts, February 17, 2026.

This is the most operational sentence on the page and it is older than the brief by seven months. The usual version of the rule, that there are no dumb questions, is a kindness. Her version is a pricing model. A question has a cost that rises over the life of a project, because the cost is not embarrassment, it is the expectations other people have already built on the assumption that you knew. Early, the question is free and the assumption does not exist yet. Late, the same question invalidates work.

The same session set a threshold: fifteen minutes stuck, then ask someone, anyone, including the person at the next desk. And it gave the reason the question is the only instrument that works: “the only way to actually find out what they’re thinking is just to ask the questions.” Nothing else returns the information. Guessing what a manager wants is a forecast; asking is a measurement.

“You are so much more likely to ask the question if you just approach it with, like, humility and an eagerness to learn … I’ve approached [a colleague] like, ‘I just, I don’t know what’s happening.’ And what’s been awesome is that sometimes he’s also just looked at me like, ‘Dude, I don’t know either.’ And then that helps you establish that, like, sometimes it’s not even a fault of your own.”

In a career conversation with a junior colleague, April 9, 2026. The colleague's name is replaced.

The second half of that is the part a cleaner essay would cut and the part that matters. The value of the question was not only the answer. Half the time the answer was “I don’t know either,” and that answer moved the problem from her head into the open, where it turned out to be nobody’s fault and everybody’s job. The hand finds out whether the gap is in you or in the situation, and it cannot be found out any other way.

“Fear can prevent us from doing the work right, and well, because we don’t ask the questions that we need to ask.”

In a debate about corporate AI policy, July 22, 2026.

“Raise your hand when you don’t know” assumes the sentence “I don’t know” is rare and costly. On her own record it is common and cheap. Across the recordings where her voice is labeled, about 666,000 of her words, the phrase appears 1,904 times, once every 350 words.^[1] She says it constantly, and the interesting question is what the phrase is doing each time.

A mechanical split sorts the 1,904 into two kinds. In 426 of them the phrase has an object after it. “I don’t know what all to include.” “I don’t know how London House stacks up.” Those are hands: a fact is missing and she names it. In the other 1,478 the phrase stands alone, usually at the front of a sentence that goes on to say exactly what she thinks. “I don’t know. I just am like, I can do it.” Those are hedges. The words are identical; the job is the opposite. One admits a gap. The other insures a claim against being wrong.

The month-by-month series is uneven and worth looking at anyway. The hedge form peaked in May at 4.37 per thousand of her words, in the weeks before the intern program started, and fell by more than half to 1.83 in August and 1.91 in September. The question rate went the other way: September’s 10.48 question marks per thousand words is the second-highest month on record. Thirty-three recordings in one month are not a trend. They are the first data points after the brief, and the direction is the one the brief asks for: fewer softeners, more questions.

One reading of the count is that the brief is aimed at the wrong thing. She does not need to say “I don’t know” more. She needs the 1,478 to become the 426: the phrase kept, the object added, the softener turned into a request for a fact. That is what raising a hand does to a sentence. It gives “I don’t know” something to point at.

“Our greatest gifts as humans is that we can speak, but it is more beautiful and more powerful to not speak, and to really believe, like, to hold both of those truths and to just then therefore listen more. And in listening to others, you’re listening actually to yourself … I want to listen more because I talk a lot. I have a lot to say. But that doesn’t mean that. There are so many things I’ve learned, and I’ve already been astounded by the times when I took ten seconds, like literally counting to ten seconds, and in that moment, someone else said, like, drop, like, straight wisdom.”

Said in an adaptive-leadership workshop, September 24, 2026, answering what she is working on in herself.

The book she had just reread, which she asked the room not to laugh at, is the one she was reading aloud four days earlier: Kierkegaard’s discourse on the lily and the bird, where a man who thought praying was talking becomes quiet, and then more quiet, and finds that prayer was listening.^[2] Her translation of it is a timer: ten counted seconds before speaking, and then whatever the other person says into the space. She reports the result as a surprise. The space gets filled with something she would have talked over.

The same week produced two smaller versions of the same resolution. On September 15, in a workshop on personal values: “I’m trying to listen more than say that anything is one way.” On September 24, about a decision she could not make alone: “I need to listen more, because I’m not gonna figure it out by myself. I’ve been spinning my wheels.” And on the 17th, coaching a classmate, the method stated as a method: “So, listening, I try to pick up on patterns and ask questions that relate to you.” Listening, in her practice, is not the opposite of the hand. It is what the hand is for. You ask so that you have something to listen to.

There is one number for this, and it comes with a confound stated up front. Her share of the words in a recording, all speakers counted, sat near half from March through July and rose to 70 percent in August, when she was managing an intern program and doing most of the talking on purpose. In September, at Booth, it fell to 30 percent. Part of that is the setting: lectures and panels put her in the audience. Part of it may be the count above. The number cannot separate the two, and it should not be read as if it could.

“Steve Jobs was once asked, what did you learn, after he was fired from Apple and he was having his own renaissance period, and he waited 34 seconds to answer this question. What changed for him was, he said, I take a long-term view on people. I don’t jump to fix mistakes when they’re made. Instead, I focus more on making sure that they themselves fix the problem.”

In a late-night conversation about founding a company, September 19, 2026.

“For me, I’m long-term view, baby.”

Same conversation, a few minutes later.

“Read long term baby” in the brief is that line, nine days later, compressed. The interview she is recalling is real and the pause is the famous part of it; how long it lasted depends on who is telling the story, and the length matters less than what came after it.^[3] Jobs’s answer is not about strategy. It is about people, and about not fixing their mistakes for them. That is the same sentence as commitment three of her constitution, make yourself unnecessary, said by someone else. Her version of it that night went on: “Nothing’s an emergency. My peace matters more. Protect your sparkle.” Five days later, planning a week that was going to cost her: “Protect your sparkle. It’s long term. You always gotta think long term.”

“I used to be really ashamed to say those things aloud, and then I realized that there’s nothing to be ashamed about except giving up. Like there’s always something really beautiful and admirable about people that never give up, even when it gets hard or even if they fail … Everyone has, like, really, really long careers, so I just started thinking about things in the long term. I think that’s been the biggest difference.”

In a workshop on personal values, September 15, 2026, on growing up without money.

“Trust the process” is the last clause in the brief and the only one with no long version anywhere in the record. The phrase does not appear once in a year of recordings. What appears instead is its opposite, in her own voice, repeatedly. June 25, in a team meeting: “I am not a patient person; it’s one of my flaws.” And later in the same meeting, about a colleague who waits for a device to stop flashing before pressing again: “He’s patient, he waits … and I never wait. I just go.” February, in a different room: “Well, I’m not patient.”

So the long view is not a trait she is reporting. It is a rule she is installing against a trait she is reporting. That is a different kind of entry for a constitution, and an honest one. The evidence that she can hold it is not in the recordings. It is in the training log: a marathon plan is eighteen weeks of doing what the schedule says on days when the schedule feels wrong, and she has followed one to a qualifying time before.^[4] Trusting the process, in her life, is something she already does with her legs and is now asking her mouth to do.

“Crazy inspirational and creative” is the brief’s gloss on the same clause, and on her record that phrase has a plainer name. She calls it going all out, and she has been saying it all year. June 8, handing interns a case: “At any point, go crazy. This is your case. There is no right or wrong answer.” September 15, on what she was known for at work: “I was the person at work that would go all out for people’s birthdays, like happy birthday banner, balloon, confetti.” August 27, on why the intern program looked the way it did: “I saw this opportunity to go all out.” And June 7, leaving a meeting with someone building a company alone: “It’s so rare to find people that want to do something on their own … So this is really inspiring for me. I feel alive right now.”

The system she runs already has a rule that descends from this. It is called Boil the Ocean: when the real fix is within reach, do the whole thing, because the marginal cost of completeness is near zero and the benchmark is not good enough but clean enough to show a skeptic. The rule has been in force since the spring. What it never had was a line in the constitution above it saying why. The lake is that line. Going all out is not a productivity setting. It is what she does with a birthday, a case, a summer of interns, and a frozen lake, and the reason is in the sentence: the blanket is on the far side of the ice, and you only get it by going through.

The system this site runs on has a constitution with eight commitments and a rule for adding to it. A reflection becomes a principle when it recurs across time and settings. A principle becomes a commitment when it proves durable and has operational consequences, meaning it changes how the system behaves. Most essays are reflections. Few become commitments. The brief asks for all six clauses to go in, and the record above says they do not all go in at the same rank.

Two of the six clauses do not make commitment on their own. “Listen” and “read long term” attach to commitments that already exist, because a constitution grows by slotting a new essay into a branch of the tree before it invents a new one. The other four collapse into two, because the hand and the question and the phrase are one act, and because the lake and going all out were always the same sentence. That leaves the identity layer at ten, which is still small, and every one of the ten can be traced to something she said out loud before anyone wrote it down.

Related on this site: On Hope, on reaching in anyway; On Loneliness, on going first; On Mentorship, on making yourself unnecessary; Jenn OS, on the constitution these amendments go into.

Jenn’s lines are quoted verbatim from her own recordings and from the brief she wrote on September 28, 2026, and are dated where they appear; the connective text is exposition about those lines, not new first-person writing. Colleagues, interns, and classmates are not named. Ellipses mark trims inside a single turn.