A Mirror Shattering Moment

I was seven years into business as a nutrition consultant for dairy farms when the floor dropped out. 2008 hit.

Banks started foreclosing. Farms went under. Clients I had stood in barns with at 5 AM were losing everything they had built. Some took their own lives.

I remember sitting alone and asking the question I had never let myself ask before.

When I was fighting to keep my business going, a client who was doing the same fired me.  I drove out of his farm and down the road with this thought racing through my mind.

Do I even have any worth?

Not whether my business would survive. Something deeper. Do I have value? Am I enough?

I call that a mirror-shattering moment. A window shatters when you strike out at something. When a relationship breaks down. You feel it, but you can still see yourself on the other side. You still have confidence in who and what you are.

 The mirror is where you look for proof of who you are.

When that breaks, you do not just question the outcome. You question the reflection.

Colin Hodge had the same moment. His was in the bottom of a shower, hot water running, crying, three and a half months into a startup that had just hit a million users.

A million users. And he was on the floor. Because the mirror he had been using to measure himself was never his to begin with.

The Things We Hide — Moment

In The Things We Hide, I write about the belief cycle. Beliefs drive thoughts. Thoughts drive actions. Actions drive results. Most of us try to fix the results. The work is in the belief.

Here is the belief I carried for years without knowing it: my worth is decided by what other people see. Or how they treat, accept, or express value in me.

That belief produced a thought. If I just produce more, work harder, and earn more attention, the question of whether I am enough will finally get answered.

So I worked. And it seemed to be working. The income came. The reputation followed. Until the results stopped, and suddenly, I did not know how I could be valuable to others.

That is the trap. When your worth is tied to external signals, every setback is not a setback. It is a referendum on you.

The mirror does not just crack. It shatters.

The attention, the titles, the metrics that everyone applauded were never going to answer the question underneath. They were the wrong mirror. The longer I stared into them, the less I could see myself.

Resetting took a willingness to sit with the question I had been running from and let the answer come from the inside out.

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Podcast

Colin Hodge is a startup founder, growth strategist, and fellow Cornell grad who has led companies and growth teams responsible for over 100 million users across 17 years in tech. He is the co-owner of Down, a top-five U.S. dating app, and the author of Outrageous Startup Growth.

But the most interesting part of his story is not the scale. It is what he had to lose to figure out what actually mattered.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Colin.

1. A Mirror Shattering Moment Is a Gift, Not a Verdict

Colin hit a million signups in three and a half months. Press coverage. TV interviews. Investors who normally would not take a meeting about a “dating app” were calling. And when the shine wore off, he was on the floor of a shower.

He told me his value had gotten tied to other people’s attention:

“Too much of my value at the time did get tied to others’ impressions and other people’s attention on me.”

What saved him was not momentum. It was two friends disconnected from the tech scene who sat across from him and told him what they saw through the window. They reminded him he had already won something real. He had risked, he had built, he had made it further than 99 percent of what he had originally dreamed. The verdict was not the collapse. The verdict was on the value he provided to people who valued him.

2. Empathy Is the Foundation of Everything That Scales

Colin says empathy is the first chapter of his book for a reason. Not as a soft skill. As the foundation of how you build products, teams, and businesses that last.

He walked me through how empathy showed up in his relationship with his business partner, someone with a different style who used to rub him the wrong way. Colin had to get inside how his partner thought, what he was carrying, and where his words were coming from. And the relationship shifted completely.

Then he said this:

“Vulnerability welcomes vulnerability. You name your fears, and suddenly they don’t seem like a weapon that can be used against you.”

That is the whole game. The fears you hide own you. The fears you name lose their grip. Empathy is not just what you extend to other people. It is what you have to practice on yourself first.

3. Success Is What You Achieve. Significance Is Who You Impact.

Colin spent years chasing vanity metrics. Downloads, signups, press, the next round. Even after the exit, the parent company wanted more, quarter over quarter, never enough.

He broke that cycle by changing what he measured. His top KPIs now are user success and user satisfaction. Revenue is on the list, but it is not at the top. When I shared John Maxwell’s line that success is adding value to yourself, but significance is adding value to others, Colin did not push back. He had already lived the difference.

If you are doing the work for the kudos, the kudos will run out. If you are doing the work for the impact, the impact compounds.

Clean Your Windows — The IDL Summit, May 7–8, Spokane

Colin’s story is exactly why we are building the room we are building this May.

The IDL Summit on May 7–8 in Spokane, WA, is 120 leaders telling the truth about what drives us, what we hide, and what happens when the mirror we have been using breaks.

Nikki Barua spent years mimicking what success was supposed to look like until everything was stripped away in a single week, and she had to rebuild from the inside out. She knows what it costs to measure yourself by someone else’s reflection.

Joe Delagrave had his entire identity rewritten by an accident at eighteen. He spent years hiding behind the face everyone called inspiring while privately having no idea who he was. He will tell you what it takes to stop performing a self that is not yours.

Dr. Abbie Maroñó studies the science of how we read each other and how we hide from being read. If Colin’s story shows you what chasing the wrong mirror costs, Abbie will show you how to spot it in yourself before it costs you more.

Four perspectives. Two days. 120 leaders in a room where nothing gets hidden.

General Admission is $499. Buy two for $900.

VIP is $999 and includes a private dinner with the speakers.

Only 50 tickets still remain.

Get your tickets: idlsummit.com

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.