The Performance

Sarah's "Day 1 of Building My Startup" post got 847 likes.

200 comments.

And a feature in TechCrunch!

Which is why, six months later, she was still on Day 1.

Every morning, she'd sit down to code. But first, she'd check the comments. Then craft a vulnerability post about imposter syndrome. Then respond to DMs asking for founder advice.

Then she documented her morning routine - because her audience didn't want to see actual building - they wanted motivational quotes and struggles they could relate to without feeling threatened by actual progress.

You probably know Sarah. Hell, you might BE Sarah.

Building your audience instead of your product. Mistaking engagement for progress. Performing success so convincingly that you've started to believe your own show.

The first like is free. But like after costs a little piece of your focus. Until you're a full-time performer in a play about building something you'll never actually build.

The platforms know this. Tech bros designed their algorithms to reward performance over progress. Because Sarah refreshing her notifications every twelve minutes is worth more than Sarah shipping code once a month. It's simple math for venture capital and private equity vultures.

The truth is hard to fathom: your audience doesn't want you to succeed. They want you to struggle beautifully. Fail relatably. And stay exactly where they are so they don't feel left behind.

They have a phrase for this: crabs in the bucket mentality. And no one wants you to escape the bucket.

Every time you choose the camera over the code, the post over the product, the performance over the progress, you're trading your agency for applause from people who will forget you exist the moment you stop TikTok dancing.

The only way out of the performance is to go dark (into "munk mode".

No posts.
No updates.
No documentation.

Just you and the work. Building in actual silence instead of public solitude.

But here's the thing that'll really mess with you. Even reading this chapter is a kind of performance. You're consuming content about not performing. Probably screenshotting quotes to share. Already thinking about how to document your journey of stopping documentation.

It's the people actually building things that matter.

You've never heard of them. They're too busy shipping to post. Too focused to engage. Too deep in the work to surface for applause.

When the world is busy counting the days 'til the weekend, builders count the days to ship their build.

Sarah could delete her accounts tomorrow. Disappear into her code. Build something real. But she won't. Because she's more afraid of irrelevance than failure.

So here's my question: when you finish reading this, will you post about it, or will you close this book and build something without telling anyone you're building it?

Building in public is exactly like being a street magician... you're so busy showing the trick that you forget the real magic happens when nobody's watching.

There's a word I'd been seeking all my life without knowing it existed. Allodoxaphobia. The fear of others' opinions. And when I finally stumbled upon it, everything clicked. This was the disease killing every dream before it could breathe.

Caring what others think isn't just toxic - it's literally the difference between building something real and posting to social media for the thumbs up. Between having agency and renting it from strangers who don't even know your last name.

I know going dark feels impossible. Like professional suicide. Like disappearing from existence. And it is uncomfortable as hell to stop performing. To stop collecting validation. To stop existing in other people's feeds.

But here's what I learned after fifty-eight years of watching builders become beggars. Comfort is the curse, not the cure. And every moment you choose comfort over discomfort, you're choosing audience over agency.