What You Would Build if Nobody Was Watching

She caught herself drafting the announcement post before she had done any of the work. Not a paragraph of the actual thing existed yet, and the first two lines of the write-up were already good. She sat with that for a minute, because it was a genuinely useful piece of information about a plan she had been excited about for a month.

It is not a character flaw. Wanting people to see what you built is normal and mostly productive, and a person with no appetite at all for recognition tends to build less and share less of it. But if you are about to spend five years on something, it is worth knowing which parts of the plan are the work and which parts are the audience. There is an exercise that separates the two in about ten minutes, and it runs on two columns and last week's calendar rather than on any amount of soul searching.

How do I tell what I actually value, not what I say I value?

Look at what you already did last week, not at what you intend to do next year. Then ask of every item who found out about it, and watch which ones survive when the honest answer is nobody.

Intentions are a terrible sample. They are written by the version of you that is rested, unhurried and imagining an audience of admiring strangers. Last week is a real sample, taken under real conditions, with real fatigue in it. So open the calendar and write down, in column one, everything you did that nobody strictly required of you: the thing you read, the thing you fixed that was not yours, the hour you spent on somebody's problem, the side project, the extra draft, the post.

Keep it to the things you chose. Ten to fifteen items is a good list. Do not edit it to look better, because the flattering version is the exact thing this exercise exists to remove.

What goes in the second column?

Names, not categories. Write the actual people who learned that you did it, and then mark each row with whether you would still have done it if that list had been empty.

This is where the exercise stops being comfortable and starts being useful. "The team" is not a name. "LinkedIn" is not a name. Write down Marcus, your manager, your sister, the four people in the channel. Some rows will have six names and some will have none, and the ones with none are the entries the rest of this article is about.

Dan Ariely, Anat Bracha and Stephan Meier reported in the American Economic Review that people did more good when their giving was visible to others, and that paying people to do good raised the private version far more than the public one. When an audience is present, the audience is already doing the paying. That is not a scandal about human nature. It is a measurement you can take on your own life in ten minutes, and it tells you which of your commitments are load bearing.

What if almost everything dies in column two?

That is the normal result and it is not a verdict on your character. Almost all of us are running partly on visibility, and the point of the exercise is to find the one or two items that are not.

Most work is legitimately for other people to see. That is what work is: you build something, somebody notices, they pay you or promote you or hire you next time. A column two full of names is a sign that you are employed and connected, not a sign that you are hollow. What you are hunting for is the small residue, the two or three rows where you would have done it in an empty house, because those rows are the only ones that will still be running the month everything gets hard and nobody is clapping.

If the residue is genuinely zero, do not conclude anything dramatic. Run it again on a different week, and add one deliberate unwitnessed item to the coming week to see what happens.

Does wanting an audience make me a fraud?

No. Recognition is a real and useful motivator, and the research is more interesting than the moralizing version of this question suggests.

Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan reviewed 128 experiments in Psychological Bulletin and found that tangible rewards handed out for doing a task reliably reduced people's intrinsic interest in that task, while verbal praise generally increased it. Being told your work was good is fuel. Being paid per unit tends to convert a thing you wanted to do into a thing you are doing for the money. Self-determination theory, the larger framework Ryan and Deci built around those results, holds that the durable motivation is the kind that comes with autonomy and competence attached.

Which is the practical point. You are allowed to want the audience. You just want at least one thing in your working life that is not being paid for by applause, because that is the item that keeps going through a quarter when the applause stops.

Which surviving item should I do first?

The smallest one, this week, at a size you can actually finish. A two hour version done on Saturday morning tells you more than a five year version you keep describing at dinner.

There is a failure mode here worth naming. People finish this exercise, find the thing they would do unwatched, and then immediately scale it into a plan that requires a sabbatical, a co-founder and a new city. The plan then never starts, and the exercise gets filed as interesting rather than acted on. Do the opposite. Take the surviving item and cut it down until it fits in a weekend, then run it once, unannounced. If it is still interesting on the second Saturday, it is real, and you can start giving it proper room in the calendar.

Then run the whole thing again in three months. This is not a one-time revelation, it is an instrument, and instruments are for taking repeat readings.

The item that never gets a post

There is one entry that passes the second column automatically, and it is worth trying before you decide whether to trust any of this. Champion somebody who did not ask for it. Put their name forward in a room they are not in, for something they did not know was happening, and then tell nobody, including them.

Nothing accrues. There is no post, no reply, no thank-you, no line on a review. Inside about four seconds of deciding to do it you will find out whether the thing you say you value survives having no audience, and you will find out at a cost of one sentence. It is the cheapest honest test on this page and the only item that doubles as a favor to somebody else.

You do not need to become a quieter or smaller person to pass it. The point of knowing what you would build unwatched is not to stop wanting the recognition. It is to make sure that at least one of the engines under you keeps running on days when nobody is looking, because a person with two engines can push harder and for a lot longer than a person with one.

Sources

• American Economic Review, Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially
• Psychological Bulletin, A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation
• Self-Determination Theory, Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being