Being Ignored Early Is Actually a Gift
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👋 Hey dumdums,
Last week I found a folder on my laptop labeled "early writing samples" and made the mistake of opening it. There was a 2,400-word essay comparing my college roommate to Holden Caulfield. I used the word "paradigm" eleven times. In one essay.
I'm not saying I'm glad no one read it. I'm saying if anyone had read it and encouraged me, I might still be writing like that. Every career coach tells you to build your brand early, get noticed, cultivate your audience. But what if the best thing that ever happened to your career was nobody caring about it?
The Dumb Lens
Obscurity is a workshop, not a waiting room.
When nobody's watching, you can afford to be terrible. You can experiment without explaining yourself. You can fail privately, adjust quietly, and develop taste before anyone sees what you're serving. The moment attention arrives, so does self-consciousness. Suddenly you're performing instead of practicing. You're protecting what you've built instead of building it.
Career advice loves the language of visibility. Get noticed. Be seen. Stand out. But attention is expensive, and early in your career, you probably can't afford it. The cost of being watched is that you stop taking risks that might make you look stupid. Which are, unfortunately, the only risks worth taking.
❝ The spotlight is a furnace. Some things need to simmer in the dark. ❞
1,800 Poems in a Drawer
Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems in her lifetime. Exactly ten were published while she was alive. And she didn't authorize any of them. Her work was found after her death by her sister Lavinia, tucked away in hand-sewn booklets. No editor notes. No workshop feedback. No audience shaping what came next. She developed one of the most distinctive voices in American literature in near-total isolation. Emily Dickinson Museum
Samuel L. Jackson's Invisible Decades
Samuel L. Jackson didn't get his first major film role until he was 40, in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing." He didn't become a star until he was 45, when Pulp Fiction hit. Before that? Two decades of theater, small parts, and the kind of obscurity that lets an actor figure out who he actually is on screen. By the time Jules Winnfield walked into that diner, Jackson had put in his hours with nobody keeping score. IMDB Biography
The French Chef Was 50
Julia Child first tasted sole meunière at 36. She enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu in her late 30s. "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" came out when she was 49, and "The French Chef" debuted on public television when she was 50. For most of her adult life, nobody was watching Julia Child. She was just a tall woman in Paris who really liked butter. That anonymity let her fall in love with cooking without anyone asking what her brand was. Boston Globe
What Does Science Say?
Psychologist Robert Zajonc spent years studying what happens when people perform tasks in front of an audience. His finding: being watched helps you do things you've already mastered, but actively hurts performance on new or complex tasks. When you're learning, an audience makes you worse. A 2015 study in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that "monitoring pressure" from simply being watched caused people with high working memory to choke on executive control tasks.
Translation? The smart kids struggle most under observation. Early attention doesn't accelerate growth. It interrupts it.
Dumb Word of the Day
Latibule (LAT-ih-byool)
noun. A hiding place. A cozy, safe spot tucked away from everyone.
Let's use it in a sentence: "For five years my latibule was a corner desk at a job nobody envied, and it's where I figured out everything I actually believe."
This week, find something you've been doing in public and take it private. Maybe it's a creative project you've been posting about. Maybe it's a skill you've been learning out loud. Whatever it is, don't share it for seven days. No updates. No asking for feedback. No subtle mentions that you're working on something. Just you and the work, getting to know each other without a chaperone. Notice how it feels when nobody's keeping score.
Thank you for getting dumb with me today.
May your obscurity be long enough to make your emergence worth the wait.
David 🎉
