The Signal Is The Work
Reflections on attention, craft, and being found
Some of the most successful people I’ve known work with their heads down. Not because they lack ambition, but they anchor their attention to the work itself.
If you watch closely, you will notice they don’t organize their work lives around the usual markers of success: status, money, prestige or validation. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about success, they just refuse to chase its symbols.
Instead, they invest in something slower and less visible in the moment, but something that shines like a lighthouse over time: mastery. And paradoxically, they end up with many of these markers of success without ever chasing them in the first place.
We are taught that success at work requires managing perception, narrative, or optics. We go through the motions of learning how to manage up, down, and in every conceivable direction. Don’t get me wrong, these skills aren’t useless. They have their place and they often matter. But when they become the actual work, we lose the patience required for mastery, and the deep satisfaction that comes from making something well.
So when I’m asked to offer guidance to younger folks entering the corporate world, it is usually this: devote yourself to the craft. Look for those micro doses of “high” that come with doing real work away from the spotlight. Resist the urge to turn effort into theater. There will be environments that will push you to participate in the performance. Stick with the work anyways. And if you stay with the work long enough, something becomes clear: attention is finite, and where you place it, substance or style, quietly shapes who you become.
Recognition, then, has a way of arriving on its own. Not as an objective, but as a consequence. In time, the work (always) speaks. And the people who are meant to hear it (always) do. They follow the signal of your (great) work and in doing so, become your tribe.
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The core lesson I learned and enjoy sharing is to focus on pursuing your own passions instead of trying to please others.
"Resist the urge to turn effort into theater." Very powerful and very well summed up. For most people this becomes challenging due to the nature of popular corporate culture which is drama focussed and the real deal to recognise that the drama doesnt take one very far. Very well written and I for sure know this is what you practiced and hence so many of us could learn to put our focus in the right place.