Originally published in ILLUMINATION. This essay sits apart from the others, it doesn't document a product decision or a design system. It documents a pattern of self-deception that runs through twenty years of creative work. Pedro examines three forms of vanity he's caught in himself: the ego of authorship, when a client says "can we make the logo bigger" and something dies inside; the vanity of intellectual performance, when a client meeting becomes a fencing match of eloquence rather than a conversation about the actual problem; and the vanity of hiding, the most intimate one, where introversion becomes a mechanism to protect a self-image that may not even exist. The essay closes with Ecclesiastes and a genuinely disarming question: if everything you consider "yours" was delivered to you by chance: your intelligence, your sensibility, your circumstances, what exactly are you so proud of? If we're all products of contingency, we can hold our successes and failures with less weight, create with conviction but without desperation, and expose ourselves without the terror of being found imperfect.