Why preserving a narrative matters as much as creating one.
There are moments that quietly change the way you see the world.
For me, one of those moments didn’t happen while building a business or reading a book on leadership. It happened while learning more about the history of Haiti, my home country.
Although I’m now an American, Haiti has always been part of my identity. Like many people with roots in more than one country, I grew up knowing pieces of Haiti’s history. I knew about the Haitian Revolution. I knew the pride that came with becoming the first Black republic and the only nation founded through a successful slave revolt. I also knew the headlines that so often shaped how Haiti was perceived.
What I didn’t understand was why those two realities seemed so disconnected.
As I learned more about Haiti’s history, I wasn’t simply filling gaps in my own understanding. I was trying to understand why a nation that had contributed so much to the world was so often remembered through such a narrow lens.
I learned about Haiti’s support of Simón Bolívar during South America’s fight for independence and the condition that slavery be abolished in the territories he helped liberate. I learned that Haiti was among the first independent nations to recognize Greece’s struggle for independence, despite being a young country facing extraordinary economic hardship itself. I learned about the Polish soldiers who chose solidarity over conquest during the Haitian Revolution, and whose descendants remain part of Haiti’s story today.
The deeper I went, the more I realized these weren’t isolated moments. They were only a few examples of a much larger history. Haiti’s influence reaches far beyond what one article could ever hope to capture.
None of those discoveries erased Haiti’s struggles.
They simply made the story more complete.
That realization stayed with me because it led to a question I haven’t stopped asking since.
Who gets to tell the story?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this question reaches far beyond Haiti.
I began noticing the same pattern everywhere.
I saw it while searching for Black philosophers. Too often, the conversations began and ended with slavery, racism, or inequality. Those conversations matter. They always will. But I couldn’t help wondering why so many Black thinkers seemed to be remembered primarily through struggle instead of through the fullness of their ideas.
Where were the conversations about ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, science, education, beauty, imagination, or the questions they wrestled with simply because they were thinkers?
It felt as though entire generations had been denied the simple luxury of being known for the breadth of their minds.
I noticed similar patterns when reading about women whose discoveries, philosophies, and leadership had been credited to someone else or reduced to a footnote.
I saw it in artists whose biographies became little more than a few lines on a gallery wall, while years of curiosity, experimentation, failure, and growth were compressed into a paragraph.
I saw it in founders whose companies became more recognizable than the values that inspired them to build in the first place.
Different people.
Different histories.
The same question.
Who gets to tell the story?
I’ve come to believe that incomplete narratives are rarely created all at once.
Sometimes nothing is technically wrong.
Sometimes the facts are true.
What’s missing is context.
The details that explain why something mattered.
The questions that shaped it.
The people who carried it.
The choices that changed its direction.
Over time, the summary becomes the story.
And eventually, people begin mistaking the summary for the whole truth.
That realization has changed the way I think about almost everything I build.
When I founded Mitsooz, I knew I didn’t want artists to be represented by a short biography written in the third person.
Those biographies serve a purpose, but they can never fully capture a life of making.
So we built Studio Dialogues.
Not because interviews are trendy.
Not because video performs well.
But because I wanted artists to have the opportunity to become the primary source of their own narrative.
Years from now, I want someone discovering an artist’s work to hear directly from the artist. To understand what inspired them, what challenged them, what they noticed, and what they hoped their work would leave behind.
That approach may not be the fastest way to grow a business.
It certainly isn’t the easiest.
But not everything should be optimized for speed.
Some things deserve to be optimized for preservation.
The same philosophy found its way into Authentic Ambitions.
Every founder has a story that extends far beyond revenue, fundraising, milestones, or headlines. I wanted to create conversations where people could speak in their own words about the decisions, failures, questions, and experiences that shaped them.
Not because their stories are perfect.
Because they’re theirs.
I’ve realized that’s the thread connecting much of what I care about.
Not visibility.
Not branding.
Not even storytelling.
Stewardship.
The careful preservation of people, ideas, and histories before they become simplified by time.
I don’t believe any of us can control how history remembers us.
History has never worked that way.
But I do believe we have a responsibility to contribute thoughtfully to the record while we’re here.
To ask harder questions.
To look beyond the summary.
To make room for complexity in a world that often rewards simplicity.
Most importantly, I believe the people who lived the story deserve the first opportunity to tell it.
Because history doesn’t disappear all at once.
It becomes a little less complete every time we stop asking whether we’ve heard the whole story.
Further Reading
No single article can fully capture Haiti’s history or its contributions to the world. If this article sparked your curiosity, I encourage you to continue exploring. These are a few excellent places to begin.
- Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State – The Haitian Revolution
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/haitian-rev - Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Haiti’s Recognition of the Greek Revolution
https://200years.mfa.gr/en/recognitions-first-period-revolution-en/haiti-en/ - UNESCO – The Slave Route Project
https://en.unesco.org/themes/fostering-rights-inclusion/slave-route - Library of Congress – Haiti Collection
https://www.loc.gov/collections/ - Smithsonian Magazine – Articles on the Haitian Revolution
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/
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