No one is watching, let's just do the thing

The last few days my algorithm has been showing me content with a simple message: no one is watching. People showing themselves starting new hobbies, failing, trying again, putting themselves in situations they find awkward or embarrassing. All with the same point: no one is watching, so go live your life.

By the Adriatic Sea, somewhere between a bike ride and a run.

And I find this deeply liberating and it's finding me at exactly the right time.

I'm also almost a bit annoyed at myself for not making this connection earlier, because this is exactly what marketing is about. As communications and marketing professionals we know that repetition and continuity is the golden rule for getting a message through. We adjust campaign messaging across channels, plan it out, schedule it to meet our audience in the right context and in the right sequence. The whole point is to make someone know, feel, and do something, and that requires showing up consistently, with a high level of repetition, on multiple channels in multiple contexts, even when it feels like no one is paying attention.

And yet when it comes to myself, I relate so deeply to that fear of being seen. It goes hand in hand with imposter syndrome — that persistent feeling that everyone around you is more competent, more prepared, and more certain than you are. While in reality most of us are just figuring it out as we go.

But for that fear of being seen to actually be real, someone would need to be following your every move. Reading every blog post, watching every story, tracking every update. And that's very easy to prove wrong. Of course we want people to see what we put out, especially when we’re actually trying to build something. But there is something genuinely comforting about reminding yourself that no one has the full picture of what you're working on, and no one is watching as closely as we imagine.

And when someone does stop to read — a potential collaborator, a recruiter, someone building something they think you might want to be part of — what they find is an honest picture of how you think. That's the point of showing up consistently. Not to perform for an invisible audience, but to make sure that when the right person does look, there's something real there to find.

So here we are. Writing the blog posts, sending the emails, going to the events. Because no one actually cares, no one is keeping score, and no one is watching.

Just go do the thing.