So this is one of those newsletters in which I’m going to put on my “big sister” hat and give you a bit of career advice about why being uncomfortable can be a good thing. Yes. You read that right.

But I’ll also start by saying that I wouldn’t recommend my advice to everyone — we’re all in different places in our careers and in our lives. So proceed with caution.

When I first started out in my career as an equity research analyst, I was about to publish a pretty different-from-what-all-the-other-analysts-were-saying piece of research. Before I did just that, a “mentor” told me that I might want to reign myself in. That if my out-there research was wrong, it could hurt my reputation, and I could instead make a really good living by “staying in the pack.” That in-the-pack is the comfortable place to be. That I was going to upset the company I was writing about with my not-very-flattering research. And who needs enemies, right?

These warnings certainly resonated with me. Probably because so many of us women have been socialized to make people happy, smooth things over, and be peacekeepers.

But I’ve always been headstrong — and I didn’t like the idea of staying in the safety of the pack. So I published that research. And made some waves. And got a talking-down-to from the company that it was about.

But then the scenario I had dared to lay out in my research actually happened. The “consensus” had been wrong.