Secrets
If you have me, you want to share me. If you share me, you haven’t got me.
Secrets are a valuable currency of power. You can use them to assert, shift, usurp, or keep it. There’s something intoxicating about learning secrets, and even more so about holding them.
When I joined the government after college, I thought I would stay for two years.
I wanted to serve my country but was not enough of a rule-follower for the military. In undergrad I got a voicemail from a blocked number. “Mary at the recruitment center” wanted to talk to me about a “job I had applied to online” earlier, if I was still interested?” For the nearly 6 years that followed, I worked in a world of secrets.
I took a photo with a guy in a suit as he gave me my blue plastic ID badge, a big seal behind me in the photo. It was the first and last time a photo of me would be taken at work.
Working to steal secrets every day (and then going home and keeping them) was both exhilarating and exhausting. My friends didn’t know what I did. Since my job was intentionally meant to sound and look boring, first dates were funny, and in a sea of DC work-ism, I stood out because I excelled at not talking about work.
I found purpose in keeping my secrets secret. My colleagues trusted me with secrets that would put them in jail overseas (just as I did with them), and to a weaker extent, the government tolerated my access to state secrets to further the security and global power of the United States.
My years of secret keeping taught me, however, that secrets are just as corruptive as other forms of power.
By their very nature, secrets can be used to twist, coerce, and manipulate others. Telling someone a secret (whether true or not) gives them a sense of closeness to you. It’s a shortcut to trust, a way of elevating a relationship, and of galvanizing a team. But it’s still a shortcut, and doesn’t replace trust that can only be built over time.
Secrets are also used as barriers. When you want to lower the risk that one person, or one faulty technology, blows the lid on all the crown jewels all at once, you compartmentalize the secrets. This works, but it also ends up being used as a tool to protect bureaucratic turf.
While secrets are a currency of power, I now see that they’re like a pegged currency: stable, until they’re not. I would never rely too heavily on secrets.
Nowadays I view them with relief and humor. In my job as a venture capitalist I never have to worry about a secret that could kill someone, and that’s a relief.
The other part is funny. In a business environment where — compared to my old life — secrets are so loosely held, they can feel frivolous. I never figured that being good at keeping secrets would be one of my competitive advantages. Does anyone know how to keep a secret anymore?
