Staying invisible is costing you more than being cringe ever will

And FYI, the fear sounds exactly the same no matter how "successful" you are

I’m writing to you from up in the sky, my favorite co-working space. But I’m editing this back in New York, where fake spring is officially here, it’s a cloudless 69 degrees today, and the sky is staying lit a little longer. I can taste the Hugo spritzes dancing on my tongue.

The view from the other side of your inbox, live from my Manhattan balcony.

When I read my old journals from the last time I lived in New York, I mostly wrote when the weather turned nice. As if I couldn’t process anything until the city thawed from the intensity of winter. In Los Angeles, 70s and sunny is the default. In New York, it feels like something you’ve earned. (I think I’ll try to be more bicoastal next winter.)

---

Cringe mountain has no shortcuts

Something I’ve been thinking about, as I embark on the journey to climb cringe mountain¹, is how universal the fear of being seen online really is. I advise founders, leaders, and artists on how they show up publicly. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve made, how many followers you have, or how respected you are in your industry. The fear sounds exactly the same:

Am I being too self-promotional?

Why will anyone even care about what I have to say?

IS THIS CRINGE???

And then, when you finally feel brave enough to post… crickets. Or worse, that mean girl former coworker views your story and sends you into a spiral about whether you should just delete the whole thing and go back to being invisible.

There is a deep unmasking that comes with this work. And I don’t mean “personal branding” in the way the internet talks about it, all polish and positioning. I mean the part where you have to decide what you actually think, commit it to words, and let other people see it. That’s a vulnerable act. It doesn’t get easier because you’re successful. In some ways, it gets harder. You have more to lose. More people watching. A reputation that could be dinged.

Each time I show up and hit publish, that inner critic shuts up a tiiiny bit more. I see my peers who’ve been doing this consistently, building real businesses around their ideas, finding their people, clarifying their body of work. None of them woke up one day without the fear! They just decided to stop letting it make the decision for them.

I will hold your hand when I say this, and please know I’m talking to myself too: there are people with half the experience and twice the visibility making more money than you. Not because they’re better at what they do, but because they had the audacity to show up consistently and say something out loud. That’s very annoying. But it’s also the thing that keeps pushing me to get over myself.

And culturally, the permission is shifting. As Anna Mackenzie put it:

What’s invisibility costing you?

But what makes this more than a feelings problem is that the cost of staying invisible has also changed. So many people are showing up online now, because they have to. Our digital identity is increasingly tied to our economic viability.

The New York Times has been putting journalist headshots and expanded byline pages front and center, not because they suddenly care about vanity, but because trust is eroding and people want to know who’s behind the words. As their trust team editor put it, readers wanted to see that reporters weren’t part of a “faceless institution operating in a distant tower.”

There’s also something that researcher Sophie Bishop calls “influencer creep” — how the labor of being an influencer has seeped into professions that never asked for it. In media, journalists are expected to build personal brands. Reporters who leave legacy outlets are starting Substacks and podcasts. And it’s not just media. Lawyers are becoming TikTok creators, breaking down legal concepts for millions of followers. Teachers are building audiences around their methodologies. Doctors are on YouTube. Therapists have newsletters. The professional who would rather let the work speak for itself is increasingly competing with the professional who can also narrate the work.

There are exceptions. Andrea Lisbona built Touchland into a brand that sold for $700 million — largely on the strength of the product distribution and the brand itself, not her personal social media presence. (Ali Kriegsman did a phenomenal piece on this last fall, asking the increasingly relevant question: do you have to be an influencer to be a successful CEO?).

Selling for $700MM and No One Knows Who You Are.

I unfortunately think exceptions like this are becoming rarer. For most of us, our face and our voice are the product. Or at the very least, they’re the front door.

This can sound hellish for the people who’d rather stay behind the scenes, but I don’t think staying invisible is an option in the way it used to be. Sure, if you have millions in capital, you can hire celebrity ambassadors and let someone else be the face. But even then, it’s more expensive, less authentic, and audiences increasingly want a consistent voice they can build a relationship with, not a rotating cast of paid endorsements.

And if money isn't what's driving you, if it's something harder to name, like wanting to feel like your perspective matters to someone other than yourself — the obstacle is still the same. You have to be willing to be seen.

Find your medium, find your people

I’m not telling you to start a TikTok and dance for the algorithm. But I do believe that there’s a medium and a rhythm for everyone, and it doesn’t have to look like what the loudest people on the internet are doing.

If you hate being on camera but writing feels more natural, publish on Substack, and use Notes, Threads, or LinkedIn to give your pieces wider reach.

If you don’t like writing but enjoy talking, record voice notes and turn them into vibey visual Reels with b-roll.

The point is that you have something to say, and there’s a way to say it that doesn’t require you to become someone you’re not. And I want to be clear: this is not a side project. It's not something you knock out on a Sunday night between emails. Building a public voice, whether that's a Substack, a LinkedIn presence, a podcast, whatever your medium is, takes real time and energy. It goes faster with support, a team, a collaborator who can help you execute. But even then, no one can do the thinking for you, despite what AI hype might suggest. The ideas and the consistency have to be yours.

I believe every person has a perspective worth communicating, and not because the algorithm demands it, but because honest expression contributes to something larger than any one post. It creates resonance. One person’s willingness to say something real gives permission to the next person, and then the next. That’s how movements get built and how communities form. That’s how ideas actually travel.

The reason I became enamored with writing, moved by media, passionate about the internet in the first place, is because someone was sharing their message in a way that made an impact on me and inspired me to share mine, in my own unique way. That is not self-promotion, that is a form of service! (Go read Grace Abbott‘s amazing perspectives on this. They are mantras I return to!)

9 excuses you're making not to do your creative work and my rebuttals

And, look. I know there’s an irony in telling you to spend more time on the platforms that are actively melting our brains. I think about Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death often. The book was written about television in 1985, but forty years later its central argument has only intensified: the medium shapes the message, and we’re all operating inside systems designed to prioritize spectacle over substance. Postman warned that society would succumb not to censorship but to distraction, and here we are, hopelessly addicted to devices that were designed to keep us addicted.

And while that’s absolutely true, and I am increasingly prioritizing offline connection, etc… If we’re going to spend hours a day on these apps anyway, we might as well be the ones creating, not just consuming. You can build something with that time, that actually means something to you, or you can watch everyone else do it.

I know what’s true for me: I communicate because I want to deeply connect with people and that’s what makes me feel alive. Writing and media are my vessels for expression. And I trust that if I keep showing up and keep saying what’s actually true for me, the resonance will come.

1. Grace Abbott and Grace McCarrick shared this TikTok with me in their Social Studies Cohort last year and I refer back to it all. the. time. Once we make it to the top of cringe mountain, we are free!