The Gift of Invisibility

A few years ago I read the book Quitter by Jon Acuff. It is an interesting book and Jon is an interesting person (he writes the blog Stuff Christians Like and subsequent book). A couple things stood out to me that caused me to pause and think about the many things I have spinning right now. He referred to a gift we all need but few of us want. A gift I don’t always perceive as just that, a gift.

The gift he is referring to is the gift of invisibility.

There are many circumstances where waiting is the best thing, but inherently we want our stuff to grow immediately and be successful right away. Whether it’s a new startup, a new project, a new relationship, a new job, a new venture or anything we start, we want to jump right on the HOV lane to success. It’s hard for us to wait and be OK with invisibility.

Visibility makes things harder:

• It’s harder to take risks when people are watching you
• It’s harder to remain innovative when people have a specific expectation of who you are and what you do
• It’s easier to play it safe when you are visible. If you have 10,000 people buying your product then you now have 10,000 reasons to play it safe because there is more risk
• It’s harder to pilot and learn because of increasing expectations and visibility  

The bottom line is when you are visible you have something to lose.

Steve Jobs said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” The most dangerous person is the one who has nothing to lose. Just look at all the “manly” movies and the hero who sacrifices it all to save the woman or the world. They are dangerous because they have nothing to lose.

The opposite is true also. The safest man in the world is the one who has everything to lose. When we are living with the gift of invisibility we don’t have as much to lose. There’s not as much at stake. This provides us the margin to do things we couldn’t do if it were the other way around.

Invisibility gives you the freedom to make mistakes on your own and learn before you make it big.

Google took this approach because they were OK with invisibility. Co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin said:

“We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we’d made a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.”

Are you OK with being invisible for now? Do you see it as a gift that is allowing you to try things and do things that will get harder as your “thing” grows? As a leader, stay true to yourself during these times and soak up all the opportunities to learn and get better so you're prepared when the opportunity presents itself and you become visible. 

Please pass this along if the content resonated with you. For more content, please visit my website Coreytowe.com. I'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to leave comments or join the leadership conversation.