Show Me Your Teeth

I used to think the people who accomplished extraordinary things probably felt extraordinary while they were doing them. I imagined they floated through the world with some kind of INTERNAL CERTAINTY, like they always knew they were talented enough or brave enough or built correctly for the life they were pursuing. But the older I get, the more I realize most people are just standing at the edge of some metaphorical cliff, completely unsure whether their wings are going to work.

It reminds me of this scene from DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot. Brightbill, the gosling, is trying to learn how to fly before migration season, except his wings are visibly smaller. You watch him fail over and over again while the sky fills with these huge, sweeping formations of birds who seem to understand flight instinctively. Meanwhile, Brightbill is crash-landing while Roz, his stranded robot mother figure, tries to engineer solutions around a problem she cannot brute-force her way through, studying flight patterns, building runways, calculating trajectories, doing everything she can to compensate for something she ultimately cannot control.

At one point, Brightbill catches some air and yells, completely shocked, “I’m up!” and for a brief second it feels triumphant, like maybe belief alone is enough to keep someone airborne. But then he pushes farther from the cliff, looks down at the water and the jagged rocks below, and something shifts. You can feel it happen in real time, the excitement collapsing into something heavier as the reality of the distance sets in. It isn’t confusion exactly, and it isn’t just fear. It’s recognition, the kind that lands all at once: this is real, this is actually happening, and underneath that realization is a quieter, sharper thought that follows almost immediately.

What if I’m just not built for this?

He falls straight out of the sky.

Roz catches him hard enough that she leaks oil on impact, and the whole moment loses any clean, inspirational framing. Everybody is improvising, everybody is scared, and in the middle of it, Brightbill looks at his wings and quietly says, “It’s no use. They’re too small.”

What stayed with me wasn’t just the line, but when he says it. Not before he tries, but after he’s already been in the air. After he’s already felt a version of it working. And honestly, I think that’s when doubt gets loudest for a lot of people. Not before you start, but right after you realize what the thing might actually demand from you.

Because before that, failure is still hypothetical. Romantic even. You can imagine yourself becoming the kind of person who does extraordinary things someday, without fully confronting what it might cost to sustain it. But once you actually get a little airborne, once opportunities become tangible, once people start taking you seriously, once the possibility shifts from fantasy into consequence, suddenly the distance between you and the ground becomes visible too.

And I think that’s when a lot of people quietly panic. Not because they stopped wanting it. Because now they understand how far they could fall.

I asked a friend recently what his own “cliff moment” was.

Alex told me that when people read headlines about studios or founders or creative success, the story usually gets compressed into something much cleaner than it actually felt living through it. A decision, a launch, or a leap.

But he said starting his studio took years before it looked like a beginning. While he was working at Pixar Animation Studios, he had built a friendship over nearly seven years with someone who loved his work and kept saying, half casually:

“We should make something together someday.”

Alex always brushed it off. The timing just didn’t seem to align. He cared deeply about his friend and was interested in the concept. But he had stability. A career. A life that made sense on paper. And besides, even if he wanted to make something independently… how would he actually produce it? How would he support himself?

Then one day his brother asked him:

“What if this IS the path?”

Alex immediately resisted the idea. He told me he was what he called a “reluctant founder.” He never grew up fantasizing about being a CEO or building a company. He just wanted to tell meaningful stories.

But eventually his brother pushed him to test the idea seriously. 

“If your friend really wants to make something with you,” he told him, “then tell him what it would actually cost.”

So Alex did. And to his surprise, the friend said yes. That was the moment everything became real. Not magically certain. Real. 

He called up people he trusted from Pixar. His people. And slowly, piece by piece, the thing started becoming possible. 

What stayed with me most, though, wasn’t even the story itself. It was the advice Alex gave me afterward. He said maybe it’s actually GOOD that I think so carefully about leadership, responsibility, and building something meaningful. That maybe the people best suited for those roles are often the ones who approach them reluctantly. The ones who understand the weight of it. The ones who aren’t chasing the title as much as they’re trying to protect the thing they care about.

And then he said something I haven’t stopped thinking about since:

“When it’s truly the right thing, you’ll feel a sense of peace.”

And I think that conversation shook me because, if I’m being honest, I’ve spent a long time building my life in a way that allowed me to stay close to cliffs without fully standing at the edge of one myself.

I genuinely love supporting visionary people. I love helping shape stories and ideas and protecting creative ecosystems and building alongside people who care deeply about what they’re making. But lately I’ve started realizing there’s a difference between choosing that role intentionally… and quietly hiding inside it.

Because if you stay close enough to someone else’s flight, you can convince yourself you’re moving too. You can spend years standing safely behind the rock, studying the sky, helping other people prepare to jump, becoming incredibly fluent in possibility without ever fully testing your own wings against the air.

And I think part of what’s been happening to me lately is the uncomfortable realization that I may not be allowed to stay there forever.

What I love about the Brightbill scene is that the movie doesn’t interrupt his fear with false reassurance. Nobody tells him his wings are secretly the same as everyone else’s, because they’re not. They are smaller, and that part is real.

Instead, the story shifts.

Fink, the fox who has been co-caring for him, looks at Roz and says, “You can’t be up there with him,” and it’s such a small line, but it changes everything because Roz has already done everything she possibly can. She has protected him, believed in him, built systems around him, caught him every time he fell, but there comes a point where love is no longer the same thing as guidance.

Encouragement alone cannot teach someone how the sky feels.

So they go find someone who actually understands flight.

Thunderbolt arrives composed, the kind of presence that makes everyone else feel smaller, and you can almost feel Brightbill bracing himself, like he already knows what Thunderbolt will inevitably point to.

His small wings.

Thunderbolt studies him for a second and says, almost amused: “So, you think small wings to be a disappointment.”

Then he extends his own.

“Small wings are teeth. The claws of the sky. Show me your teeth. Beautiful… Begin.”

That moment doesn’t feel like motivation so much as recognition. Like someone looking directly at the thing you’ve been trying to hide or fix or apologize for and saying: no, that’s actually the thing.

And I keep thinking about how rare that is.

Because the most life-changing thing someone can do for you isn’t give you talent or hand you confidence. It’s helping you reinterpret yourself differently enough that you finally step forward with the thing you already had. Maybe that’s what growing up actually is. Slowly stepping out from behind the rock, walking toward the edge, and realizing your wings were never supposed to look like everyone else’s in the first place.