Not Bad

Learning the Art of Disappearing Loudly

Some of the stories I share here are personal—drawn from my walks, memories, or passing thoughts that demanded coffee and conversation.

But this one’s from the trenches of my working life. Specifically, the time I graduated from being a confident office multitool in Jebel Ali to a confused spreadsheet in a multinational maze.

My first job in the Gulf was with a local company in Jebel Ali. Nothing fancy. No HR playbooks or quarterly culture refreshes. Just a bunch of practical people, a bunch of chaotic operations, and one poor guy—me—trying to hold it all together.

I handled office admin, warehouse issues, supply hiccups, people drama, and the occasional “What just happened here?” with equal enthusiasm. I was the guy who noticed things. My radar was so sharp, I could spot an operational glitch before it even made up its mind.

I was bold. Decisive. Useful.

Basically, I was thriving. And I knew it.

Then I got hired by a multinational.

You know those giant corporate ships that need twenty approvals just to turn 5 degrees to the left? I was on board one of those now.

And everything changed.

Suddenly, I felt like the odd piece in a perfect puzzle.

Everyone was polished. Articulate. Fluent in acronyms. Carrying just the right balance of caffeine and caution in their coffee mugs. I, on the other hand, walked in with what I thought was experience but now looked suspiciously like overconfidence.

First, I had to learn the corporate dialect. In Jebel Ali, a delay was a delay. Here, it was a strategic pause. Back there, we “fixed problems.” Here, we “escalated deviations for process alignment.”

But the real shift was inside me.

I told myself I’d need to adapt. After all, I wasn’t exactly multinational material.

I didn’t wear those semi-confident expressions people in global companies seem to master… where you look like you know what’s going on, but not so much that you get assigned more work.

So I told myself to tone it down.

I stopped charging into issues like a warehouse superhero and started lurking politely around meeting rooms, hoping no one would ask me to make a deck.

My sharp observations? Still there. But now I delivered them in slow, hesitant emails with ten disclaimers and a bullet point that said: “Just a thought, feel free to ignore.”

Everything within my scope was still easy for me… once I got past the obstacle course of approvals, process checks, stakeholder consultations, and moral support groups.

And then came my boss.

He was not the fire-breathing kind. Nor the mentoring kind. Just the minimalist kind. Stoic. Quiet. Capable of giving detailed performance feedback using a total of two words:

“Not bad.”

That was it.

You could wrestle a report into perfection, save the department from reputational ruin, or survive three back-to-back calls with procurement… and all you got was:

“Not bad.”

It was devastating.

I was used to “Brilliant work!” or at least “Nice job!” Now, I was navigating a world where muted praise was the gold standard and enthusiasm was considered a security threat.

But over time, I realised something.

In a world where everyone was loudly advertising their own greatness, this man simply… wasn’t.
He didn’t need to prove anything.
He was grounded.
And suddenly, I saw that trying to prove myself—bending and shrinking just to fit in—had taken me further away from who I was.

That was the turning point.

I stopped trying to sound like I belonged. I just did my job. I used my eyes, my instincts, and yes, even my unfashionable straightforwardness. I stayed sharp, but I brought back the boldness. Carefully. Like someone testing the water with one foot while still holding the towel.

And guess what?

“Not bad,” he said again, one day.

Only this time, I smiled.

Because somewhere between the dusty warehouses of Jebel Ali and the boardrooms of Excel-powered diplomacy, I’d finally understood…

“Not bad” is actually not bad.

And needing someone to clap every time you breathe?

That’s the real problem.