caption: a tumblr post for the history books. real ones know.
Nothing in this world is more freeing than knowing you are truly just a dumb bitch. Real ones will understand the weight of this statement and how it can and should affect everything in your life.
Someday, I plan to write a thesis on the merits of himbos, fembos, and thembos. There is a whole internet cultural history to be plumbed there, one that skates into the recesses of 2014 Tumblr and still manages to come out relevant. That is, unfortunately, out of scope for today’s post. I’ll just say this—RIP Socrates, you would have loved the himbo alignment chart.
I am become dumb bitch, knower of my limits
My first annual review in corporate America was a roller coaster ride. Teachers are used to getting feedback frequently. But in many corporate spaces, feedback tends to get saved for the annual or semi-annual review. This makes the whole process that much more daunting and intimidating as all hell. I will never understand why everything in corporate America needs to be so serious when we literally all die but whatever, I’m not smart enough to run a company.
Anyways, my boss and I sat in a meeting room together for about an hour during my first annual review ever. The majority of his feedback wasn’t a surprise to me. He was generally quite good about bringing up feedback items during our biweekly one-on-ones, so our annual review time was a chance to discuss those things more in depth. During this conversation, one piece of feedback he had truly was a surprise to me.
He told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was too confident during a recent lunch & learn that I had delivered. I had answered a couple of questions from my coworkers about a new BI tool we had adopted, and in my quest to be confident and knowledgable, I had stepped outside of my lane of knowledge and said something incorrect. Big oh shit moment right there.
Now, of course, my first reaction was “holy shit my guy, did you just tell your only female direct report, to her face, that she’s too confident? Where in the hell do you get the nerve?”
I’ve been in too much therapy to trust my first reactions to anything. I kept that reaction internal, and I heard him out. He had a point. I had answered a question from a coworker on a completely different side of the business without understanding the full context of what he was asking. I should have asked more clarifying questions before answering. I should have adopted a posture of assuming I don’t know every use case for our BI tool and defaulting to getting clarity on the question being asked of me. I didn’t do that! I just answered the question with the first thought that came to my head. Bad move.
We talked through the whole problem, and I walked away from the conversation with a few strategies to try the next time someone asked me a question at work. I’ll list those below for you now.
Don’t answer a question with the first thing that comes to your head.
Restate the question to the asker in your own words. See if you got it right.
Ask follow up questions to discern what the asker is trying to solve.
Ask follow up questions to figure out what an ideal answer to their question will have.
Are they trying to narrow down options in some way to make a choice?
Are they trying to explore their options in solving a problem?
Are they stuck between two options and trying to pick only one?
What complications could get in the way of them getting an answer?
Figuring out the answers to those questions above will get you a long way. Had I asked those questions in my offending presentation, I would have understood a lot more about the question being asked of me.
My coworker asked if our BI tool could be used to assess battery life of hardware devices that we manufactured. I told him yes. I was wrong.
Had I asked those follow-up questions, I would have understood that:
My coworker needed real-time information about the battery life of the hardware devices.
He wanted to query tables that held that information in real-time, and didn’t love doing it through the backend. He thought our BI tool might be a nicer interface.
The BI tool was a nicer interface, but it did not provide real-time information, it refreshed every 4 hours.
Taking the time to ask those questions would have meant I understood the answer to his question was in fact no, our BI tool would not be helpful in assessing battery life.
I had not taken the time to understand his problem. I had also approached his question with the mindset of a supposed expert, and not that of a fembo.
The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.
That ⬆️ is a quote widely attributed to Socrates. I couldn’t find a primary source confirming it, so we’ll have to go with www.thought-provoking-quotes.com and assume it was Socrates.
I felt a little defensive when my boss first gave me the whole “you’re too confident” feedback, but he was right. There’s a difference between carrying yourself with confidence (how I try to be) and being overconfident and saying shit that you don’t know anything about (my failure mode).
I’ve thought about it a lot ever since. I’ve thought about that feedback through the lens of that famous quote above. And, because I was shaped deeply by the way the internet was in the 2010s, I needed to also process this feedback through the lens of a well-loved concept: the Himbo.
Hopefully, you are a careful reader and you’ve inspected the image at the top of this post. If you haven’t, go scroll up right now and take a look at it. I’ll give you a handy heading below so you know what to come back to.
Start here after you’ve looked at the image at the top of the post
The classical definition of a himbo is that they are kind, beefy, and stupid. Himbos generally refer to male-identifying folks that meet all of those criteria, but it need not be gender-specific. Someone of any gender may be a himbo. But, if you’re like me, and enjoy signifiers that also indicate your gender, you might want to strive to be the female version of a himbo. A female himbo is called a fembo. You might be asking yourself, why not just a bimbo?
That question is too loaded for this post. Bimbo has long been used to insult women who like such horrible things as painting their nails and wearing frilly outfits, and it’s not a term I particularly think has been de-charged enough to reclaim. Some women do like to reclaim it though, and more power to them.
Fembo, to me, carries all the positive implications of himbo, but for women. I won’t spend too much time on the merits of being kind and beefy, I think I could write entirely too long of treatises on both of those traits.
The stupid part, though. That’s what we need to think about. That’s what I spent a long time thinking about after my boss told me I was over-confident.
That’s what I spent a long time thinking about when I mulled over the Socrates quote. The whole “only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.”
And I couldn’t help but wonder (sorry—couldn’t help myself)—are fembos the true aspirational state of being? Is being kind, beefy, and stupid simply knowing your own limits and approaching work and personal problem through the lens of curiosity instead of know-it-all overconfidence?
If those of us who are far too online approached most interactions through the lens of the fembo, could we be better at our jobs? Could we be better friends? Better partners, siblings, family members?
I think it’s exactly the cure that we need.
A fembo is not intellectually vacant. She knows some things! But more importantly, she knows what she knows, and knows what she does not know. A fembo is acquainted with the limits of her own knowledge, and is constantly asking herself, “do I actually know much about this problem at work? Or could I ask more questions to learn more about it?”
She’s conscious of the depth of her coworker’s inner lives, and is well aware that every human life is an unprecedented experience, and every human experience is far too complex for her to ever completely plumb.
She has confidence in her knowledge that has been put to the test, and in her knowledge that has proven successful at least a few times. This knowledge might be work-related, but it could also be related to platonic or romantic relationships.
But a fembo, at her core, is kind, beefy, and stupid. She knows that she cannot possibly know everything there is to know, but it doesn’t stop her from trying. She is curious and humble, and believes in asking lots and lots of questions.
A fembo would have asked more questions of my coworker instead of immediately assuming she knew the answer to his problems.
I’d venture that the solution to many personal and professional problems lies in this initialism: WWAFD?
What Would a Fembo Do?
Thanks for reading. In case you haven’t noticed—I’m a bit sporadic at the moment. I’m getting married in the beginning of September and then immediately going on my honeymoon. I anticipate being a bit sporadic until all that calms down.
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