Your name walks into rooms before you do. Take care of what it carries.

People hear about you before they meet you. What arrives ahead of you is a short summary assembled out of how you behaved when you thought it did not count, and you do not get to write it. You only get to influence it slowly, by being the same person repeatedly.

Ask yourself what somebody would say about you if you were not there to explain. If you do not like the answer, the repair is a few months of ordinary reliability.