Being Good at Your Job Is No Longer Enough
On visibility, memory, and the quiet cost of only ever showing up in person
I used to believe relevance was something you earned by showing up. The right trade show. The right handshake. The right dinner table, seated near the right person. If you weren’t in the room, you simply didn’t exist to the people who mattered.
I don’t believe that anymore.
Somewhere along the way, the room changed shape. It stopped being a place you traveled to and became something closer to an address — a feed, a profile, a post someone scrolls past at 11 pm on their phone. And the strange, slightly humbling truth underneath that shift is this: you can be excellent at what you do and still be invisible, simply because no one has ever seen you think.
That realization stung when it first landed. It meant competence alone — the thing I’d spent years building — wasn’t the whole equation anymore. Someone has to find you first. And findability, it turns out, is a skill in its own right, separate from the skill that made you worth finding.
The quiet demotion of physical presence
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t an argument against the handshake. A shared meal still builds a kind of trust no algorithm has figured out how to fake. I’ve built real relationships in real rooms, and I don’t think that stops mattering.
But I’ve also watched too many capable people rely on physical presence alone, and quietly lose ground to people who were, frankly, less capable — just more findable.
Physical presence has limits that are easy to overlook because they’re so familiar we’ve stopped noticing them:
It doesn’t scale. You can be in exactly one place, with exactly one group of people, at exactly one time. Meanwhile, a single honest, well-considered post can reach someone on another continent while you sleep.
It’s expensive to sustain. Flights, booths, dinners, the accumulated cost of being physically present in enough rooms to matter — all of it adds up in a way that a well-written paragraph simply doesn’t.
And it fades. A genuinely great conversation at a conference can be unforgettable in the moment and completely gone a week later, because nothing was left behind to be remembered by. Human memory is generous in the moment and merciless afterward.
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Online, something different happens. The record stays. People don’t meet you once and extrapolate a guess about who you are — they watch you, over time, in small increments, and slowly decide whether to trust you. It’s a slower kind of proof, but a more durable one.
What Gen Z understood before the rest of us did
It has become fashionable to talk about Gen Z’s relationship with digital platforms as a generational quirk — an appetite for oversharing that the rest of us should tolerate, maybe study, but not necessarily learn from.
I think that’s a mistake.
Watch closely and you notice something else entirely: this is a generation that never learned to separate the online self from the “real” one. For them, there was no gap to close in the first place. What the rest of us clumsily call “personal branding” — a strategic, slightly uncomfortable performance — they simply experience as being.
And in the process, they’ve quietly arrived at truths it took the rest of us considerably longer to learn:
Raw and honest tends to outperform polished and safe, because audiences have developed a fine instinct for the difference between something said and something merely staged.
Showing up often matters more than showing up impressively — consistency, in small doses, compounds in a way that occasional brilliance doesn’t.
And nobody wants to be broadcast at anymore. They want to be talked with. The generation raised inside comment sections understands, instinctively, that visibility now is participatory, not performative.
There is something almost moving about that, when you sit with it. A generation that grew up being told the internet was a fake version of life turned it into the most honest room they had.
What I try to remember
None of this resolves into a clean five-step plan, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells you it does. But a few things keep proving true, and I try to hold onto them.
Say something. A profile that exists but never speaks is only marginally more useful than no profile at all — presence without voice is just a placeholder.
Be consistent, even when it feels small, even when it feels like shouting into a quiet room. Trust is rarely built in one perfect moment; it’s built in repetition, the way a familiar voice becomes a trusted one simply by returning.
And borrow a little of that instinct Gen Z seems to have been born with — reply, engage, show up for other people’s ideas before asking anyone to show up for yours. Visibility earned through generosity tends to outlast visibility bought through self-promotion.
The handshake still matters. I don’t think that’s going away, and I wouldn’t want it to. But it lands so much harder now when the person on the other end of it already knew how you think before they ever met you.
We didn’t lose the room. We just stopped needing four walls to be in it.
