How to Prepare for the Next Decade
HM85: New podcast with Scott Barker and the perils of marketing before building
Click above to play the new Humble Mind podcast episode with Scott Barker.
Scott Barker spent fifteen years optimising his life for success - tech, VC, a fund that raised over $100M. What he found at the top: a pill to focus, a pill to sleep, and no idea who he was anymore.
This episode is about what came next, and the idea Scott calls the Acceleration Decade: a period of relentless change we’re all unprepared for, because we’ve spent years overriding the very things that would help us survive it: connection, stillness, meaning.
His case: meaning isn’t a luxury. It’s what makes you antifragile. One of our best conversations, enjoy!
Don’t build in public (do this instead)
A recent re-reading of Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power has made me rethink something I have done instinctively for most of my career: building everything in public.
It’s easy to see the appeal. You’re developing a business, fleshing out new ideas and sharing what’s influencing you along the way. It follows to create an audience as you go by talking about what you’re doing while you’re doing it. There might even have been a golden period over the last five to ten years in which this made perfect sense for creators, entrepreneurs and business builders.
Market the thing by narrating the making of the thing. Why wait until it’s finished?
I have done this many times, across many businesses. Not as a conscious marketing campaign, but as an instinct. Because of the nature of what I do - working with people, in conversation, in rooms - I am always, in a sense, building and working in public. The work and the telling of the work happen largely in the same breath. I’ve noticed that the urge to build or tell in public and begin marketing prematurely is probably because I get bored of waiting and want to act or feel like I’m doing something.
But this has caused more problems than solved for me: not because I was doing it wrong, but I was doing it too soon for where the project was at the time, and what kind of attention it truly needed from me.
And yet I am increasingly convinced that building in public (at least in the way we think about it) is not only a poor strategy for the long-term survival of whatever you are creating, but a genuine risk to your reputation that you may not have considered.
Let’s get into it.
Opening a new account in the red
When you talk about something you have not yet done, you create an expectation.
Whatever you put into the ether about what your project will do, how it will work and how great it will be: that becomes the bar. And nobody set that bar but you. Nobody asked you to announce it. Nobody invested on the basis of your promise. You did that to yourself.
By the time you have declared your mission (and all it is, at that point, is a mission) you have already opened your bank account in the red. Aside from some good talk, which may well be brilliant talk, you have nothing to show. Which means you are on the back foot until you do.
There are people who follow through on this, and I will always give them credit. But the problem is that most of us create a far larger obstacle than we need, especially in the early stages when the vision is still forming and the progress is fragile.
You need every ounce of energy and focus you can get. Marketing what you do does not fill the space of what still needs to be done in order to deliver it. In fact, in unequal measure, it drains the very energy that the doing requires.
The unknown unknowns can eat you alive
When you are building something truly new, unique and difficult (which often come in the same package) you are going to meet obstacles that you did not plan for.
Some of those obstacles will take your project in a completely different direction. They may expand the original vision beyond recognition, or reduce it to something smaller and more honest.
The nature of an unknown unknown is that you have no idea how much of a no idea you have. In that uncertainty, everything is waiting for you: the terrible mishaps and failures that can take you off course by years, as well as all the unfathomable connections and opportunities that can take a million-dollar concept to the billion-dollar level.
While you are in this fragile stage, speaking too soon can be costly. Every public commitment you have made about what you are building becomes a cage. The narrative you created in the early days, when you knew the least, forces you into a pigeonhole of what you think other people think they need from you.
Those assumptions will not only kill a business before it gets out of the womb, but also impact your confidence and clarity of your vision, because now you’re not just navigating the unknown: you’re navigating the unknown while performing certainty for an audience.
I experienced this first-hand during the early days of founding Humble Mind. I was not clear enough yet on what I wanted to do with my fledgling community and who it was for. But instead of taking the time, space and silence to think through this clearly, I sought that clarity elsewhere. I spent too much time in too many conversations with people who, despite having my best interests at heart and wanted to support me, ended up giving me too many ideas that muddled my own clarity.
I thought I was lining up customers, but really I was losing time and focus, setting me back by months and even years.
You attract the wrong crowd too early
If you build in public and speak too soon about what you’re making, you tend to attract small fish. These are people who, for a lack of their own vision or energy or project, will try to flatter you into serving their needs in some way.
This is not necessarily malicious, but it is seductive. It is easy to stop at the first line of recognition and settle there, rather than allowing the passing stages of people and trends to run their course. Worse, you begin to feel a public pressure to deliver a message that fits the times (or people) as they are, rather than focusing on where they may be going. A music producer friend of mine once said that as soon as you can spot the trend, it has already passed.
You do not want to become an untimely appendage on somebody’s subscription list because you spent too much time talking up what you do and not enough time actually delivering or building it.
Ultimately, in building too publicly and too soon, you are setting yourself up for an impossible task: trying to deliver on whatever all of that talk was exciting within people. And that excitement was never yours to manage. It was yours to earn later on, with the work itself.
What I’m really learning: patience
What I am learning, slowly and often painfully, is to spend less time marketing what I don’t have yet and more time listening. More time observing and in conversation without an agenda or a pitch.
One of my collaborators, a very successful individual, recently described his own approach in a way that stayed with me. He spoke about the discipline of patience: of spending long stretches in careful observation, studying the landscape, staying quiet and undetectable and then moving with such precision and timing that the moment of action is almost impossible to miss. He spoke about striking like a viper. It works not because it was loud, but because it was exact.
I am learning to operate more like that. To spend far more time listening than speaking. To build context quietly, so that once the moment comes, which it will come, one clear, decisive move can deliver beyond anything a premature promise could have managed.
You don’t want to broadcast your target, method and your timeline to the world before you’ve even begun or proven it. Not because secrecy is glamorous, but because the target will have moved while the assumptions you created have not. That’s par for the course. And now you are chasing something that no longer exists, weighed down by expectations that were never necessary.
The work, when it arrives, should speak with a force that no amount of early narration could have manufactured. A little more discipline, and a little less marketing.
The product or solution will be ready once its out of the oven. And then, it’ll be able to do its own talking, once everyone can see and smell it for themselves.
I hope you enjoyed reading.
Humble Mind is a facilitation and social learning practice building communities, human skills and the conditions for real learning.
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All the best until the next one,
Alex