My Why.

Seven months into brisk, here's the story I never told you.

Lu Tomšić

Aug 06, 2026

Ahead. Or on knowing it and never being able to say it.

This one is personal.

I’ve been ahead for years. I never learned how to say it out loud.

Two degrees. Four countries. Thirteen years across corporate insurance and an AI startup automating claims.

None of that made saying it any easier. If anything, it made the silence louder.

I was never the overachiever people assume. I’m lazy in the most efficient way possible, and I’ll take a mid-range grade for minimal effort every time.

I guess this is where my imposter syndrom comes from.

My master’s was the exception. I decided it mattered, so I finished with a 1, “sehr gut” in German grading, not because anyone was watching but because I wanted to prove to myself that I could.

Knowing you can do something doesn’t make you confident. It just means you’re good at proving it to yourself, and bad at telling anyone else.

It’s been seven months since I started brisk. And I’ve never told you why.

Not the AI part. That one’s obvious. The real one.

Here it is.

The Rules Nobody Said Out Loud

I grew up as a Croatian immigrant in Germany. My parents left a war-torn country and arrived with a plan: work hard, don’t cause trouble, and eventually someone will notice and reward you.

The rules were never spoken out loud. They just showed up everywhere.

Get good grades. Don’t ask for too much. Stay invisible. Behave, and you’ll be safe.

There was a second rule underneath the first one. Respect anyone older than you, especially anyone with a title, and don’t question them even when something feels off.

And a third: what would the neighbors say. It was never really about the neighbors. It meant don’t do anything that could be seen and judged (who am I kidding, it was definitely also about the real neighbors) 😆

I understood where the rules came from. My parents survived things I never had to. But they stuck long after the reasons stopped applying to me.

If you were raised to keep your head down and trust the people above you, you already know these rules.

They don’t stay in your childhood home.

They follow you into every meeting where someone senior is wrong and you already know it.

Breaking It Once, Then Following It Again

At nineteen, two months into a business degree I didn’t want I called it quits. It felt so wrong, I had to break free. So, I found a family in Costa Rica and booked a flight. I couldn’t count to three in Spanish. I went anyway, working as an au pair, learning the language by living inside it.

By month four I was speaking Spanish without ever taking a class.

That was the first time I broke the rule. It worked. That should have been the whole lesson.

Instead I went for round two. Went back to studying. I finished my degree in Germany, the US, Argentina, and Brazil, on scholarships and part time jobs, because my parents couldn’t send me money to do it any other way.

I also built and ran a small business through most of it. Different story, for another time.

By then I had done a lot, but nothing with a name attached that would mean something on a CV. That’s what I was raised to chase: a name people recognized, proof that someone had noticed.

I applied to as many well-known (corporate) companies as I could find. The insurer in Munich was the fastest to say yes, so I ended up in an industry I hadn’t chosen, in an internship I’d taken for the name on the door, not the work behind it.

And I liked it anyway. I liked the office, the people, even the outfits.

I thought, look at me, I finally made it.

After the internship, they even offered to pay for my master’s if I stayed and worked full time while studying nights and weekends. I said yes. The rule was back in charge, and now it had a manager attached to it.

Respect Your Elders, Even the Wrong Ones

For a long time I did exactly what I was taught. I looked up to anyone senior, anyone with more years in the job than me, and I gave them my respect before they’d earned it.

I didn’t question whether what they were doing was good. I assumed if they were older and higher up, they knew something I didn’t.

The longer I stayed in corporate, the less that held up. A lot of what I was deferring to was politics. People collecting a big salary while chasing whatever made this quarter look good, never looking past it.

Not everyone. Some of the best bosses I’ve had made corporate good to work in. But middle management, for the most part, was the weakest link I kept running into.

I started speaking up eventually. That part of the story isn’t true the way I told it: that I just kept my head down for thirteen years. I didn’t.

I was told I needed to be more diplomatic. I’m direct, which in Croatia isn’t a flaw, it’s just how people talk to each other. The rest of Europe doesn’t always agree.

I watched colleagues with weak ideas, the ones who never pushed back on anything, get promoted over people who knew what they were doing and thought for themselves. Corporate doesn’t reward competence. It rewards compliance.

Every time I tried to leave, I got offered more money and a better title instead. I used to think that meant I was good at my job. Now I think it meant the system was even better at keeping people who should have left.

That’s the real reason I didn’t post anything for thirteen years, on top of the “neighbor rule”:

I’d been trained to distrust my own judgment against anyone older, more senior, or more established than me, including my own instincts.

If you’ve ever bitten your tongue in a meeting because the person talking had ten more years than you, you know this feeling. A lot of other overachievers do too. They don’t say so either.

I knew, somewhere under all of it, that I didn’t fit. I spent a decade assuming that meant something was wrong with me, and not with the room.

That’s part of why I started writing in public. I got tired of being the only one who knew what I thought.

What AI Gave Me

December 2022. A colleague mentioned ChatGPT before the holidays. I’d never heard of it, so I googled it that night.

I spent the entire Christmas break using it in secret, convinced they’d start charging a billion or shutting it down any day.

I wasn’t panicking. I was fascinated. I slept fine.

Until I realized around the same time that I had spend 10 years of my life in corporate.

That ten-year anniversary caught me off guard. I did the math and realized where it had all started: an industry I’d picked by accident, at a company that hired fastest, for an internship I’d only wanted for the name on my CV.

No more excuses. I left the insurer 2 months later and joined an AI startup automating insurance claims. One step closer into the direction I wanted. I told myself that was the break I needed. It wasn’t.

My clients were still corporate. The politics followed me there too.

In January, thirteen years into working, I finally posted something under my own name instead of hiding it. I started brisk.

I still find it cringe. But I do it anyway.

I did it on the side, without quitting my job. I also started taking on AI work of my own (hit me up if you need advice, an audit, education or implementation or book a call at brisk.vision).

Seven months later, I’m still writing this newsletter every week. That’s the part that surprised me, not the newsletter itself. The not quitting.

I truly enjoy it and can’t wait to do it full time.

What AI gave me was structure. For the first time, I had a way to take what was stuck in my head and get it onto a page in an order that made sense.

I’d spent thirteen years learning to swallow what I thought. I never lost the thoughts. I just never learned how to get them out.

AI is the first thing that gave me a way to do it.

I’ve been ahead for a while. I always suspected it, and I could never quite own it out loud. Now I can, because I finally have the words.

That’s my why, in full. I write brisk because AI is the first thing that gave me a way to say what I already knew.

If you already sense you know more than you’re saying out loud, that’s worth paying attention to. Open Claude tonight and start structuring the thing you already know.

This is the most personal thing I’ve written for brisk. It’s also the first time I’ve introduced myself to you.

I don’t know exactly what that means for what I write next, so I’m asking you.

Reply and tell me which one you want more of:

PS - Hit reply. I read every single one.

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