“You do not shine under the bright lights; the bright lights only reveal your work in the dark.”

Joshua Medcalf, Chop Wood Carry Water

TLDR: good work doesn’t speak for itself. Other people speak for it, and they can only use the words you’ve given them. If you’re one of the quiet ones, your story probably hasn’t caught up with your work yet.

“We never realized how much we relied on Brian until he wasn’t there.”

That’s what my coach, Djuro Peric, said at the end-of-season awards in my first year playing college football (soccer, for my American friends 😉) in Ohio. I’d just won Best Midfielder.

I had a decent year but got hurt towards the end of the season and ended up missing a chunk of games.

Djuro was an older Croatian guy, and I loved him because he was just one of these people who lived for football and for developing his players.

I know he meant it as a compliment. But it kind of made me feel bad at the time because I thought to myself, “If I’d stayed healthy, maybe we could have won more.”

But that, I feel, sometimes has become a defining part of my career. In football, I’ve always preached doing the basics well. It’s what I teach my son today. And in business, it’s no different, except that nobody tends to notice the basics until somebody stops doing them.

I’ve watched the same thing happen to a lot of good people since, and I think I finally understand why it keeps happening.

Why quiet high performers get overlooked

I’ve never been one for the spotlight. I like working in the background, and for most of my career I just assumed the work would take care of the rest.

Wes Kao wrote about this in her essay about reverse impostor syndrome. The people most prone to it, she says, “don’t usually seek the spotlight,” are “used to their results ‘speaking for themselves’” and are “traditionally more comfortable doing the work vs talking about the work.”

I’d tick every box on that list. Maybe you would too.

These are usually the people you’d want on your team (at least I have). They’re good at what they do, and the people around them know it. But ask someone outside that circle what they’re about, and you’ll unfortunately get a job title from three years ago, or a polite shrug.

Good work doesn’t speak for itself

Most of us grew up believing that good work speaks for itself. It’s a comfortable belief, because it lets us skip the part that we don’t enjoy. After all, meritocracy is the script that we’ve been given most of our life.

The research is a lot less comfortable. In 2010, Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues ran a randomized experiment at Ctrip, a big Chinese travel company. The call-center staff who worked from home handled 13% more calls a week. Yet compared with office staff who performed just as well, they were less likely to be promoted.

To be fair, the researchers don’t claim visibility was the only reason. But being more productive didn’t turn into more promotions, and that pattern will sound familiar to anyone who’s spent a career in the background.

The way I see it, your work never really speaks for itself. Other people speak for it, and they can only use the language that you’ve given them.

If you haven’t given them any, they reach for the old version. Your last title, your company’s logo, the project you led five years ago. Or they say nothing at all, because they honestly don’t know how to describe you. It’s a big part of why credentials don’t travel the way stories do.

My father’s story

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because of my father, who passed away recently.

He was a pilot, an entrepreneur, and an electrical engineer. I felt as if he could do anything, and he really could. When I was young, I would wonder to myself, “Oh, I wish he would go for the presidency of the football association in Antigua,” or “I wish that he would run for office in the area where we lived,” because he was someone for whom doing the right thing simply mattered. And we all know that we need more people like that in the positions of society where they make a difference.

During one set of elections, he was fighting to make sure that votes weren’t stolen and that they were counted correctly. He picked up the ballots and transported them to the counting station, all the while being chased by some corrupt cops. I remember him telling me that he wasn’t sure if he was going to make it home that night. Most people wouldn’t put themselves in that situation.

And even though he did those amazing things, I still felt as if that story never measured up to who he actually was. I sometimes wished more people knew that side of him, not just what he’d done but what he stood for.

It’s something that he chose, for sure, because in a lot of those positions, it’s not just you. It’s also your family who gets involved. That wasn’t something he wanted, and I respect that. He knew what mattered to him.

But that’s what I see so much today: people who are humble, who keep their heads down, who just want to do great work and get better at their craft. Most of them are better than their story, and the story is the only part that most people ever hear.

How to help people describe your value in one sentence

None of this means turning into someone who posts every day or talks over people in meetings. The goal you’re after is to become easier to understand.

It starts with one sentence that someone else could repeat about you when you’re not in the room. Something like “Call me when…”, followed by the problem you’re best at solving and something you’ve done that proves it.

Say it’s “Call Anna when your AI pilots look great in a demo, but nobody in the company actually uses them. She got ours from three pilots down to one tool the whole sales team uses.” Or “Call Mike when the numbers don’t add up the week before a board meeting. He found the hole in our forecast in two days.” Someone can pass either of those sentences on to a friend over coffee. “Anna is a digital transformation consultant” is just as true, but it’s generic and not something anyone can do anything with.

Then test your sentence out loud to a few people who already trust your work, so they have the words ready the next time your name comes up, and your body of work can travel without you.

Djuro only found the words once I was on the sideline. My father’s story never quite caught up with him, and that was his choice to make.

But if you’re one of the quiet ones, doing good work without making much noise about it, you don’t have to wait for an injury, a layoff or a going-away speech before someone says what you’re worth. And you don’t have to become someone you’re not, either. Sometimes you just need your story to catch up.

Don’t wait to be missed to be understood.

FAQs