Stop Performing Your Life
Why pretending you've arrived is ruining your growth
Good morning everyone.
A while back, after speaking at a conference, a young man approached me and asked for help with his business. He looked about eighteen, maybe twenty, so my first question was the obvious one. What do you do, and how big is the team? Twenty-five people, he said. I was genuinely impressed. Hiring twenty-five people at that age is remarkable, and I told him so. We swapped details and agreed to jump on a Zoom call a few weeks later.
The call started well. Then I began to dig. What does your operations lead handle? How do you run payroll? Who reports to whom? With each question, the picture dissolved a little more, until it became clear there were no employees at all. The twenty-five people were a loose string of friends and acquaintances who helped him out from time to time. The established business was, in reality, one person in his bedroom with an idea.
I want to be careful here, because my aim is not to shame him. If he had said to me, “I’m trying to get something off the ground, it’s early days, but I think it has real potential,” I would have been just as impressed, probably more so. Early-stage ambition is attractive. What baffled me was the impulse to pretend, and what worried me more was how long he had been doing it. Three or four years, by his own account, spent performing a business rather than building one. That is three or four years he will not get back.
The counterfeit path
Here is what I think is going on, and why I suspect his story is not unusual. Social media has quietly introduced a second path to every worthwhile pursuit. There used to be one road: you did the work, slowly, and eventually the results spoke. Now there is an alternative on offer. You can look like you run a successful business, or you can run one. You can look healthy, or you can do the unglamorous work of building health. You can look wise, or you can read, fail, reflect and grow. For almost everything worth having, there is now a cosmetic version that costs a fraction of the effort and pays out immediately in attention.
The problem is that the counterfeit path is genuinely tempting, because the real one is boring. Nobody posts the spreadsheet. Nobody films the fourth rewrite of a pitch, or the gym session in week seven when nothing visible has changed, or the awkward call where a client says no. The internet rewards arrival, so people rush to look like they have arrived. Positioning becomes the work. Branding becomes the work. The actual work, the slow accumulation of skill and trust and reps, gets postponed indefinitely because it produces nothing you can screenshot.
I understand the pull. I work in media, so I spend my days around the machinery of perception, and I feel the temptation as much as anyone. It is far easier to grandstand than to build. It is far easier to announce than to deliver. Talking about the thing gives you a small hit of the same feeling as doing the thing, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous. You can spend years snacking on the feeling of progress and never eat a proper meal.
The boring middle
The truth about anything worth building is that most of it happens in a long, unphotogenic middle. The start is exciting and the finish is celebrated, but the middle is just bricks. One after another, laid when nobody is watching, most of them indistinguishable from the ones before. Scripture puts it plainly: do not despise the day of small beginnings. I would add that we should not despise the day of small continuings either, because that is where nearly all of life is lived.
So here is my encouragement, if you are in that middle right now. If your business is smaller than the version of it in your head, if your progress is real but invisible, if you have nothing impressive to say when someone asks how it is going, you are not behind. You are simply on the honest path, and the honest path always looks unremarkable from the outside. The pretenders will lap you on perception for a while. Let them. Perception is a currency that eventually gets audited, and when it does, the only people left standing are the ones who did the thing.
You do not need to look like you have arrived. You need to keep laying bricks.
One after the other, for longer than feels reasonable, until the building speaks for itself.
If this landed with you, hit reply and tell me what you are building in the boring middle.
Have an amazing week
Mike Omoniyi
This is so real and challenging!
Real