October 9, 2026

Issue #001: In eighth grade I shaved off both of my eyebrows.

There I was at thirteen, locked in my bathroom with my dad's Gillette Mach 5 and a plan.

Quick context. We had just moved from Orange County to the mountains of North Georgia, and I was fairly certain I was about to be Sunshine from Remember the Titans.

I was very wrong.

Wrong haircut. Wrong accent. Wrong clothes. Wrong backpack. And a very long bus ride every morning, sitting by myself.

Then one morning a kid named Cody pointed at my forehead.

"Dude, you got a freaking unibrow."

He didn't whisper it. Everybody looked.

Now just for the record, since this is going on the internet, I did not have a unibrow. I had the little bit of peach fuzz every human being on earth has. (If you don't believe me, go look real hard in the mirror. I'll wait.)

Didn't matter. In that moment I was pretty sure I was the only person on the planet who had one.

So I got home, found the razor and some shaving cream, and started going to work.

A little off the left. Now the right is wrong.

Well, everybody's going to notice if I don't fix that. A little off the right. Oh no. A little too much.

Back over to the left, and that's when I realized I was running out of eyebrows.

Oh no. The deed was done.

Yesterday I was the unibrow kid. Tomorrow I'm the no-brow kid.

I went to sleep praying I'd wake up with the flu.

But nope. I walked onto that bus the next morning looking like an extra from a Star Trek film, and my mom would not let me stay home. (Brutal. Also the right call.)

So why am I telling you this?

Because I still watch grown creatives shave off their eyebrows every single week.

Ok, not literally. It's a metaphor, people.

A client complains about one deliverable, so you rebuild the whole thing.

Somebody says you're too expensive, so you knock off 20% before they've finished the sentence.

Somebody mentions your site looks a little dated, so you start a redesign.

You didn't close your last two leads, so you think you should change industries and sell something else.

Every one of those is a razor to the brow. (I've done a double take on price more than I want to admit.)

And not one of them was a decision.

Every single one was a reaction. Somebody said a thing and I moved. I didn't ask whether they were right. I didn't ask what I actually wanted to change, or whether anything needed changing at all. I picked up the razor because doing something felt better than sitting there being the kid with the unibrow.

So what's the rule when somebody hands you feedback like that?

It's your business. You get to decide.

Stop getting pushed to and fro by the wind. Look at the thing that's yours and ask yourself one question.

Am I making this change for me, or am I making it for somebody else?

Clients get a vote. Everybody else just has an opinion, but you're the only one who gets the final say.

And you can relax a little, because you can be successful running almost any version of this business. There's no one change you have to make or you lose it all. So you don't have to move scared.

Just sit down, get calm enough to actually look at it, and work out whether it's a wise move.

Nothing has to change in the same conversation where it got questioned. Decide tomorrow, when Cody isn't standing in the middle of the school bus.

Jonathan "no-brow" Ray

PS. Eyebrows grow back on their own. Offers don't.