Here’s why you stopped being bold, and how you can become bold again

Roxi Nicolussi
7 min readSep 12, 2023

Boldness, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, refers to a brave or confident way of behaving that shows no fear. It would be pointless to provide any further definitions as they all have two recurring terms — brave and confident.

It is the audacity to dream big, to not be confined by the limitations your mind has conjured even when the odds seem insurmountable.

What if we translated ‘boldness’ to typeface? You know, “Bold”, “semi-bold”, or “italicized”. (“Regular” will be intentionally skipped.)

Let’s imagine humans as typefaces. I created a quiz to help you find out yours.

Bold Types

The emboldened text draws our attention towards it, making the rest of the passage dwindle.

Humans that are bold also garner attention by being visible, expressive, and daring.

If we think of people as font-weight, we all start off bold. As children, we know what we like and aren’t afraid to throw a tantrum if we don’t get it. If we like something, we do it. It’s as simple as that.

As we get older, we gain more information about the world and get feedback from our peers. Sometimes that means bullying. We are told that the things we like are “wrong”, not enough…

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Roxi Nicolussi

futurist, strategist and change coach — writes about life, tech, design, travel, boldness www.bigpictureroxi.com