Worth Repeating: Nobody’s Watching

A Life EngineeredOct 28, 2026

Worth Repeating: Nobody’s Watching

How to overcome the spotlight effect and use it to your advantage.

Oct 28

grayscale photography of man — Photo by Ahmed Hasan on Unsplash

Worth Repeating is where I bring back older pieces that still hold up. This one has a bit of history: it was the very first newsletter I sent from Substack, back in August 2024. Most of you weren’t subscribed yet. I think today’s topic is a good one to think about, especially as we close the year out and head into review season.

During my last year at Amazon, I was involved in a high-stakes negotiation. We were at the corporate headquarters of a large company to discuss a potential deal with their C-Suite. They had provided lunch, but I’d missed out because I had caught a late flight. When I walked into the meeting room, someone kindly handed me a boxed lunch, and I took my seat at the table.

I was absolutely starving. All I wanted to do was eat the bag of Cool Ranch Doritos in my hands, but the room was quiet except for the executive speaking. I tried to open the bag as delicately as I could, but the room seemed to pick up and amplify every rip and tear, as if I had a microphone in front of me. I finally got it open and then proceeded to eat the crunchiest chips out of the loudest bag of Doritos in the history of man, praying as I ate that my hunger hadn’t jeopardized the deal.

After the meeting, when we were chatting with each other, I apologized to several people about the noise I’d made, but they all told me that they hadn’t noticed me eating the Doritos.

At that moment, I realized that I had fallen into the trap of the Spotlight Effect. We tend to think that we are being noticed by others more than we really are.

We may be the center of attention in our own lives, but we aren’t the center of attention in other people’s lives.

I talk to a lot of people who want to be tech content creators but don’t want the backlash that comes from creating content. That, and they don’t want their friends and family to talk about their work. So they hold back.

Linear Orbit

Linear is running a one-day event in San Francisco on December 9 called Orbit. The premise is that we can now produce more software than ever, and the day is about what it takes to make it good. Karri Saarinen is speaking, along with Katelyn Lesse from Anthropic, Will Larson from Imprint and Can Duruk from Modal, with more to come.

It’s invite only, and Linear has given me twenty free seats for A Life Engineered readers. Sign up here, the first twenty people are in!

But here’s the thing. Nobody’s watching you.

Everybody is busy with their own lives. When I tell people that I have a YouTube channel, the conversation goes like this:

“Oh! What is your channel about?”
“It’s a channel targeted towards people in tech who want to up-level their careers.”
“That’s really cool. Can you pass the Cool Ranch Doritos?”

And there’s the corollary to Nobody’s watching you: nobody cares or is as impressed as you think they should be.

If you want to make content, make it. You can figure out how to duck the paparazzi after you become famous.

While the example I gave was inconsequential (the deal went ahead), the place where I see the Spotlight Effect do the most harm is with promotions and performance evaluations. Time and time again, I see people operating with the belief that their good work will speak for itself.

The net effect is that they get passed over for promotion because of visibility. That is, lack of visibility of their next-level contributions. Not because people want to deny them, but because there are so many things to notice, so little bandwidth for noticing, and because of that inherent bias that everyone has towards themselves as the main character.

So what should you do to combat this?

Here’s what I suggest you do. Periodically create and send a digest of your contributions to your manager, and proactively send a status of your projects to stakeholders over email or Slack. Some people might consider this to be over-communicating. But really, this is just regular communicating. It may feel like too much because you’re stuck in your own spotlight. There are two things at play here:

We have an innate desire not to repeat ourselves. If you’re a programmer, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is a tendency that is often taken to the extreme. We may have an intense aversion to repetition, but if we communicate our contributions and status updates as described above, the recipients will not see that as us repeating ourselves.

We may think that if we do this we’ll simply be spamming others with annoying self-promotion, but the reality is that everybody filters out the signals from the information overload that is the reality of our daily lives. Just stick to the facts, and if you can highlight the contribution of others as well, that makes it much easier to send.

“Hey folks, I just wanted to send a status update for Project X. We’ve finally broken ground on milestone 2. I’ve just completed and shipped component XYZ for milestone 1 after some delay. We first had to resolve some performance issues in the ABC service. We’re still on track for our November launch. Big thanks to Judy for helping us remove this critical blocker!”

Remember, nobody’s watching you as much as you think they are. So don’t be afraid to shine a spotlight on yourself. Those who aren’t interested will filter you out anyway, but those who are interested will register your contributions.

And if you could, please pass me the Cool Ranch Doritos?

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