The Jagged Edge of a Bullseye Les Paul
Music was never just in the background for me. It was a lifeline. But it was also an education in how to show up in the world.
I still remember the first time I really paid attention to Zakk Wylde leaning over a custom bullseye Les Paul, ripping through a pinch harmonic right next to Ozzy Osbourne. It sounded like an alarm going off. It was jagged, unpolished, and completely unapologetic.
Ozzy was a frontman who never pretended he had it all perfectly together. He was openly battling extreme demons, notoriously weird, and entirely himself. There was zero polish. He didn’t try to act like a pristine, classically trained musician. He just got up on stage, stood in front of millions of people, and let the chaos out.
Watching the two of them was a visceral masterclass in refusing to comply. It gave you permission to stop performing. To stop sanding down the edges of your personality just to make the people around you comfortable.
Ozzy Osbourne — "I Don't Wanna Stop"
The Room Where I Played Pretend
Early in my cybersecurity career, I didn’t have that kind of courage. I thought being a founder and an executive meant I had to put on a corporate costume.
I remember sitting in a stiff, oversized boardroom with the C-suite of a major client to review the results of a penetration test my team had just run. We had blown right through their defenses with minimal effort. Their network infrastructure was an absolute house of cards.
But as I sat there in a suit that felt like a straightjacket, looking down the table at these highly paid executives, I felt the intense, suffocating pressure to be palatable.
Instead of telling them the hard truth—that a teenager with a laptop and a weekend could take their entire business offline—I softened the blow. I used sterile, textbook phrases like "elevated risk vectors" and "opportunities for architecture remediation." I sanded down every sharp edge of that report so no one in the room would feel defensive or uncomfortable.
The result? They nodded politely, thanked me for the organized report, and did absolutely nothing. I watered myself down to fit their room, and in doing so, I robbed them of the exact urgency they had paid me to deliver. The room stayed comfortable, but the company stayed vulnerable.
The Threat of the Corporate Sandpaper in 2026
Look at the modern work environment right now. The pressure to smooth yourself out has never been worse.
Today, "getting sanded down" doesn't just mean biting your tongue in a meeting. It means actively adapting your personality to sound like you were generated by a language model. We are drowning in AI-scrubbed emails, hyper-optimized Slack messages, and leaders who are terrified of taking a hard, definitive stance. Everything is designed to be frictionless.
People are so desperately trying to be agreeable and professionally optimized that they’ve entirely scrubbed away the grit that actually makes them effective. But when you sand down your edges to fit into the modern corporate machine, you don’t become a better leader. You just become interchangeable.
The Brutal Quiet Behind the Volume
There is a critical distinction I learned from watching Zakk Wylde, though: keeping your edges doesn’t mean you get to be an undisciplined hack.
If you watch Zakk play a solo, it looks like complete mayhem. But underneath all that deafening volume is a guy who obsessively practices scales eight hours a day. The chaos is earned. You only get to play that fast and look that wild on a stage if you have put in a staggering amount of relentless, bone-dry repetition in the dark.
Refusing to be sanded down isn't a free pass to be reckless, to lack emotional intelligence, or to speak bluntly just for the sake of starting a fire. It means backing up your authenticity with undeniable, elite competence. If you have done the deep work, if you know your craft inside and out, you don't need to apologize for being intense about it. Your discipline buys you the right to be entirely yourself.
Hire for the Friction
The leaders I trust the most—the ones who actually move the needle and fix broken cultures—are the ones who kept the jagged parts of their personality intact.
They are the people whose quirks, intensity, and unvarnished opinions don’t fit neatly onto a one-page résumé or into a standard HR matrix. Are they harder to manage? Absolutely. But they are also the ones who will throw a red flag when a project is secretly failing. They are the ones who will tell the CEO the unpalatable truth when everyone else in the room is hiding behind a polished slide deck.
If you are building a team, stop looking for people who slide perfectly and quietly into the corporate slot. Look for the friction. Protect the edges.
You can either spend your career trying to fit neatly into the room, or you can own it. Pick one.