Calendar Full, Brain Empty

Escaping productivity cosplay.

The Pantomime of Seriousness

I’ve been told versions of the same thing my whole career.

“You’re doing great work, but maybe you should tone down the other stuff.”

“The social media, the writing, the panels, just think about it once. I worry that people might think you’re not serious enough.”

Every time I heard that, I laughed politely and changed the subject.

But what I really wanted to say was: why? Why does doing my job well require pretending I don’t have other interests? Why is the existence of a life outside work seen as a threat to my professionalism?

It’s strange because I love my work and do so vocally. I care about it deeply. I think of work as my truest form of worship. It’s something that I spend a bulk of my life doing, so I choose to be deliberate and focussed about it.

But I also love writing, reading, community-building, teasing out words that live in-between of culture and ideas. To me, these things feed each other. They make me sharper, more observant, more human. Yet in the eyes of many, that mix reads as distraction. The unspoken rule seems to be: if you want to be taken seriously, you must make your life smaller.

Somewhere along the way, “competence” stopped being about doing good work. It became about performing devotion. The goal wasn’t just to be capable. You have to look like you were suffering for it. If you don’t perform sacrifice, you are not ‘serious enough’.

That’s what I mean by the performance of competence.

It’s the exaggerated pantomime of professionalism we’ve all learned to act out. The long hours, the performative busyness, the visible renunciation. It’s staying online even when your task is done, adding one more sentence to an already-finished email, forwarding a document at midnight just so your name appears in someone’s inbox before morning. None of this adds value. But it adds the illusion of virtue.

We do it because we instinctively know that competence, in the modern workplace, isn’t judged by outcomes. It’s judged by optics. Who looks the most serious. Who looks the most tired. Who looks like they’re trying the hardest.

And I get it, because I’ve done it too. I’ve performed “seriousness” when I didn’t feel like it. I’ve swallowed jokes in meetings because I didn’t want to seem unserious. I’ve worn neutral colors and over-explained my creative work so it sounded like a “strategy.” I’ve answered emails while half-asleep because I didn’t want to be the person who “switches off.” I’ve performed my own competence like it was a part-time theatre gig, because somewhere deep down, I’d internalized the idea that if I didn’t make my effort visible, it wouldn’t count.

We grew up watching “serious people” act a certain way. Quiet. Measured. Overworked. They didn’t post selfies. They didn’t seem to have hobbies. Their identity was work, and that devotion was framed as an archetype worth aiming for.

We don’t say “loyalty” anymore. We say “ownership.”
We don’t say “sacrifice.” We say “hustle.”
We don’t say “obedience.” We say “professionalism.”

But the expectation remains the same: you must prove your worth through self-erasure.

If you’re lucky, your competence earns you trust. But often, it earns you scrutiny. The better you are at what you do, the more people want to see you behave like it. If you don’t, your competence is seen as a lucky break. It doesn’t matter how often, how consistently, and how well you do your work. If you don’t exaggerate its effort into simplistic caricatures of what ‘work’ entails, it’s just not enough.

And that’s the absolute absurdity of modern work.
We say we value impact, but we reward optics.
We say “take ownership,” but we really mean “stay on display.”
We claim to admire focus, but we actually admire exhaustion.

I think about this every time someone tells me they wish they could “do what I do,” but they’re afraid of what it would look like. And I want to tell them: the problem isn’t that you’re doing too much. It’s that we’ve all been tricked into thinking a narrow life equals a serious one.

I hate performing competence. I hate pretending that intensity only counts when it’s joyless. I hate that doing my job well isn’t enough unless I also act like it’s consuming me.

And if you’ve ever been told to hide the parts of yourself that make you multidimensional, this essay is for you too. Because what’s being policed isn’t your output. It’s your wholeness.

So let’s pull that apart. Let’s ask how we got here, to a world where pretending to care has become more important than consistently doing the work well.

And more importantly, let’s ask what happens when we stop performing altogether.

The Ideal Worker and the Theater of Busyness

Most of us learned what “hard work” looks like, not what it feels like.

From school onwards, we were rewarded for visible effort. Staying up late, looking tired, talking about how much we studied, and not necessarily for the clarity that comes from understanding something deeply. And then we graduated into workplaces that ran on the same script. Effort had to be seen to be believed.

That’s the inheritance of the ideal worker myth.

The original “ideal worker” was born in the industrial age: a man with no caregiving duties, no hobbies, no interruptions. He clocked in, worked long, and left his personal life at the factory gate. His worth was measured in time served, not value created. That template has now been rebranded with ergonomic chairs, aesthetic workstation photos on Twitter, Slack pings, and wellness webinars.

Even now, many offices idolize that same archetype: the person who’s always on. The one who replies instantly, stays late, never uses all their leave, and has no obvious life outside work. They look reliable because they’re constantly visible.

Visibility has become currency. Busyness has become status.

A few years ago, researchers at Harvard and Columbia found that when people talk about being “so busy,” others perceive them as higher status: more important, more in-demand, more successful. You would think leisure is a flex. But it turns out that the flex is not having time for leisure at all.

Think about how often you hear (or say) “I’m dying,” “I haven’t slept,” “I’m swamped.” We say it with equal parts exhaustion and pride. Because in this cultural logic, to suffer is to matter.

And the startup world has perfected that performance. Founders who tweet about all-nighters. Investors who glorify “grind.” Operators who brag about burnout like it’s a medal.

It’s not about work anymore; it’s about work as theater.

Psychologists call it productivity theater, which is when we perform activity to prove value. It’s why people send “circling back” emails at 11:47 p.m. It’s why your colleague updates the Notion board every 45 minutes but misses deadlines. It’s why you sit in pointless meetings because leaving early might make you look disengaged.

We act busy because busyness looks like competence. And because deep down, we’re scared that if we’re not constantly visible, we’ll be forgotten.

Visibility has replaced trust.

When managers can’t see you, physically or digitally, they fill the gap with suspicion. So employees fill it with motion. They jiggle the mouse. They add a comment. They show “green” on Slack even when they’re at lunch. Not because they want to, but because they know silence reads as slacking.

And the irony is that all this performance kills the very thing it’s meant to protect. It kills trust, creativity, and joy.

When your brain is constantly optimizing for optics, it loses the ability to wander, and wandering is where good ideas live. When you spend your day performing effort, you don’t leave space to notice patterns or take smart risks.

You just… stay busy. Forever.

I remember working with a founder who couldn’t sit still in meetings. He’d check his phone every thirty seconds, fire off random Slack messages, nod aggressively whenever someone spoke. He would change copy on Figma at 3am and demand integration by 8am. Every standup was a contest of nerves because he demanded his team’s ‘enthusiasm’ like it was a faucet they could turn off and on. On paper, he looked hyper-productive. But in practice, he was just performing leadership. His team was burned out, confused, and constantly firefighting tasks that didn’t matter.

That’s what the theater of busyness does. It creates a cacophony that may sound like music when you’re far away, but the moment you tune in, you realise it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just noise made by people who are pretending to play instruments. It’s pollution.

And because we reward visibility, people learn to optimize for it. The person who fixes the product bug or mentors the intern without making a production out of it doesn’t get noticed. The one who stays loud, late, and stressed gets promoted. Over time, organizations start to mistake noise for impact, and the culture rots from the inside.

It’s a strange loop.

Leaders don’t trust employees → employees perform effort → leaders think performance = commitment → trust erodes further.

Eventually, everyone’s pretending for everyone else.

If you’ve ever spent your day juggling windows just to look busy, you’ve been trapped in the theater.
If you’ve ever felt guilty for closing your laptop at 6:30, even though your work was done, you’ve been cast in the play.
If you’ve ever added filler blocks on your calendar with important-sounding-but-actually-nonsense-titles to make your day look “full”, you’re performing competence instead of practicing it.

And none of it feels good.

It feels like keeping up a façade that nobody asked for but everyone expects. It feels like playing a character you didn’t audition for.

The saddest part is that this system punishes exactly the people who should thrive in it: the curious, the multidimensional, the ones who draw from life to do better work. When competence becomes a stage act, depth looks like distraction.

I’ve seen brilliant people shrink themselves because they didn’t “look” busy enough.
I’ve seen managers reward responsiveness over originality.
I’ve seen founders confuse exhaustion for excellence.

It’s not that we don’t value real work. It’s that we’ve forgotten what it looks like when it’s not in our faces 24*7.

Because real work doesn’t always photograph well. It’s not a flurry of meetings or 1 a.m. emails. Real work often looks like thinking. Reading. Sketching. Waiting. Talking to people who don’t seem immediately “useful.” Real work has long periods of silence before the breakthrough.

But silence doesn’t perform well in the theater.

That’s why we keep moving, to prove that we’re still relevant. We fill every minute because emptiness feels dangerous.

The Suspicion of Having a Life

The strangest thing about modern work isn’t that we’re busy. It’s that we’re suspicious of people who aren’t.

Every workplace has that underlying hum of judgment that greets anyone who seems a little too balanced. The colleague who leaves on time. The founder who takes weekends off. The manager who doesn’t reply on Slack past 7 p.m. We whisper things like, “They’ve checked out,” or “They’re not hungry enough.” We treat boundaries like red flags.

And God forbid you have visible interests outside work. Hobbies, a side project, a social presence, a creative life. Suddenly, your competence becomes conditional. People start saying, “She’s so creative, but is she focused?” or “He’s great, but he’s doing too many things.”

I’ve lived this. I’ve been told, flat out, that I should pick a lane. That being a VC who also writes, posts online, or builds communities confuses people, and that it dilutes my credibility. I’ve been called an ‘influencer’ to my face as if it’s something derogatory. I’ve been reprimanded for not being apologetic enough about it.

Apparently, if I can write a good essay on a Sunday, I can’t possibly be serious about evaluating startups on Monday.

And honestly, it used to make me doubt myself. Maybe they were right. Maybe competence demanded monogamy. Maybe the only way to be taken seriously was to amputate the parts of me that didn’t fit the mold.

But over time, I realized, it’s not about me. It’s about what I represent.

Because when someone sees you do well without erasing yourself, it confronts them with a deeply uncomfortable truth: that their own sacrifices might have been optional. That they could have built full, spacious lives too, but didn’t.

There’s a peculiar unease we feel around people who seem to have range. We like our colleagues to be neat categories: the “corporate one,” the “creative one,” the “technical one.” It’s comforting when everyone stays in their box. But when someone crosses boundaries, when they’re analytical and artistic, strategic and playful, we don’t know where to place them.

And instead of expanding our definition of competence to welcome this new paradigm, we narrow it to exclude them.

We decide they must be unserious. Or lucky. Or worse, faking it.

That suspicion is systemic. Workplaces are built on the logic of total availability. The “ideal worker” doesn’t just work hard; they belong to their job. Anything that signals autonomy, freedom, or joy outside that structure threatens it.

Take the story of a high-performing software developer whose boss discovered he spent weekends woodworking. Overnight, the boss started treating him differently, assigning busywork, questioning his dedication. The man hadn’t missed a single deadline. His only crime was revealing that he had a passion that wasn’t monetized or work-related.

Or the employee who sang in a local band. Her boss’s tone shifted the moment she mentioned it. Suddenly, every mistake was proof of “distraction.” Every early departure was a “pattern.”

We pretend these are isolated cases, but they’re not. They’re symptoms of a larger cultural sickness, the belief that a serious person can’t have a life.

It sounds dumb as rocks when you say it out loud, but it’s how so many people live.
They flatten themselves into “job people.”
They abandon hobbies, interests, and relationships not because they don’t want them, but because they don’t want to be suspected.

Suspected of not caring enough.
Suspected of being distracted.
Suspected of being human.

It’s tragic how early we learn to self-censor joy. We stop posting photos of vacations because we don’t want to seem like we’re “always traveling.” We block our colleagues and managers off social media because we don’t want them to realise we are human beings outside work. We stop ourselves from sharing the things we make because ‘What if someone asks about a deliverable?’ We downplay creative projects because we don’t want to seem “unfocused.” We perform fatigue because it’s safer than being seen as free.

And ironically, the people who do this performance best, who bury themselves completely in work, often end up the most burnt out and brittle.

Because what they’re defending isn’t competence. It’s compliance.

I think about that a lot when people ask me how I “balance” everything. The truth is, I don’t. I don’t feel the need to. There are no neat compartments. I integrate. My writing sharpens my investing; my investing gives me stories to write about. My community work feeds my curiosity. My curiosity feeds everything else.

Everything works in tandem, and when it doesn’t, it’s fine too. I am consciously trying to let my life exist without hyperoptimization.

To me, this isn’t a distraction. Its depth.

But to people raised in the religion of work, it’s heresy.

They see multidimensionality as confusion and see confusion as weakness. Because if the world stops rewarding visible struggle, what do the strugglers have left to show?

That’s the cruelty of performative work culture: it trains you to confuse emptiness for dedication. You spend so much time proving your seriousness that you forget to enjoy the very life you’re working to build.

And when someone else seems to have figured it out, someone who leaves the office at 6, who’s rested, curious, and still ambitious, it doesn’t inspire you. It irritates you.

Because somewhere deep down, you know that’s the life you wanted.

That’s the truth at the heart of all the side-eye, the passive-aggressive comments, the “you’re too distracted” feedback. It’s not about you. It’s about their regret.

So if you’ve ever been told to dim a part of yourself to look more “serious,” remember that the suspicion isn’t proof that you’re doing something wrong. It’s proof that you’re doing something rare.

In a world that worships exhaustion, aliveness will always look suspicious.

Real Competence vs. Performed Competence

Let’s strip the performance away for a second.

If you take out the busyness, the late-night replies, the frantic motion, what’s left? What does competence actually look like?

Real competence doesn’t always have good optics. It doesn’t announce itself on Slack or glow in a progress dashboard. It’s invisible until the results appear: the launch that worked, the product that finally clicked, the team that started humming in sync.

The problem is, most workplaces aren’t designed to notice such success. They’re designed to reward noise.

That’s how performed competence sneaks in. In the carefully curated illusion of hard work. It’s the person who copies their manager on every email. The one who books meetings that could’ve been a paragraph. The one who turns “let me think about it” into a 45-minute monologue because silence might look like ignorance.

Performed competence thrives in insecure environments. When people don’t trust each other, they compensate with performance insurance which usually looks like visible busyness, exaggerated seriousness, constant self-narration. These become the survival tools you are forced to use even when you don’t feel intrinsically drawn to them, because they’re the only ones available.

The tragedy is that this kind of survivalism kills the very thing we claim to value: clarity, judgment, creativity.

Because real competence is almost the opposite of what we’ve been taught to display.

Real competence is patient. It doesn’t need to fill every silence. It doesn’t confuse motion for momentum. It’s the designer who says, “Let’s not ship this yet.” The founder who admits, “I don’t know enough, let’s test first.” The teammate who removes friction instead of performing theatrics.

And that’s why real competence is so easy to miss.
It doesn’t perform exhaustion. It doesn’t need an audience.
It just… works.

But in most offices, subtlety doesn’t sell. The loudest signals win.

I’ve seen teams where the person who fixes the crisis gets rewarded more than the person who prevented it. Where the manager who stays latest gets praised while the one who delegates well is labeled “chill.” Where “firefighting” earns applause, but foresight gets ignored.

Performed competence is dramatic.
Real competence is boring.
And we’ve built entire companies that mistake one for the other.

You see this dynamic everywhere. The founder who tweets about their 100-hour weeks gets more attention than the one who spends those 100 hours thinking clearly. Investors, too, are guilty of loving the chaos narrative: the founder sleeping under their desk, the scrappy all-nighter, the “we almost died” origin story.

It makes for good storytelling, sure. But ask anyone who’s scaled something meaningful and they’ll tell you that luck favors structure, not struggle.

Structure requires attention.

And attention requires stillness, which is the one thing performance doesn’t allow.

You can’t notice the right patterns when you’re performing the wrong ones.

When your brain is busy managing optics, it stops noticing signals. It’s too busy narrating the show to watch what’s happening on stage.

That’s why real competence often looks like… leisure. The most insightful people I know read for hours, wander, take long walks, let boredom do its work. They make space for attention.

But because our culture worships optics, we call that privilege. We forget that attention, not exhaustion, is the real luxury.

I once worked with someone who’d log off at six every day, no matter what. Everyone else stayed till nine, bleary-eyed and bragging about it. Over time, her projects kept succeeding while everyone else’s kept stalling. She wasn’t working less. She was working differently. She had time to think. She saw what the rest of us missed.

That’s real competence: the ability to discern what deserves your energy.

Performed competence, on the other hand, spreads that energy thin, much like a frantic salesperson trying to sell effort instead of results.

You can feel it when you’re doing it. You feel the tightness in your chest. You find yourself rechecking your calendar to make sure you “look busy enough.” You overexplain. You stay online long after your brain has left the building. You narrate your own usefulness because you don’t trust that others can see it.

That’s not being ambitious. That’s being anxious.

And anxiety can’t build great things. It can only perform the appearance of building.

If you need proof, look at the research: people with creative hobbies like painting, gardening, writing, anything tactile, perform 15–30% better at work than those without one. Not because they’re more efficient, but because their brains are trained to switch contexts, to rest, to think laterally.

Competence loves range. Performance punishes it.

The deeper truth is that competence is cyclical. It thrives on periods of input and output, expansion and contraction, action and reflection. Performance is linear. It never stops. It has no rhythm, no room for incubation.

And that’s why it eventually collapses.

The people who rely on performance eventually burn out, or worse, plateau. They’re so busy rehearsing the script of effort that they forget to rewrite it.

Meanwhile, the competent just keep compounding. They’re not the loudest. They’re not the most visibly busy. But they’re the ones you look up five years later and realize that they’ve built something lasting.

They weren’t trying to look serious. They were too busy taking the work itself seriously.

Toolkit 1: How to Stop Performing Competence

The hardest part about unlearning performance is realizing how much of it you’ve built into muscle memory. You don’t even notice it anymore, the nervous overexplaining, the constant status updates, the polite anxiety that someone somewhere might think you’re not trying hard enough.

The performance lives in small reflexes: Hovering over Slack long after you’ve finished. Writing “quick update” emails that add no real value. Filling silence in meetings so you don’t seem unprepared.

But if you want to move from looking competent to being effective, you need to retrain that instinct and rebuild how you measure your own worth.

Here’s how to start.

1. Redefine Visibility

Visibility is deeply misused. You can make your work visible without performing your exhaustion.

Try this: instead of broadcasting every action, summarize outcomes.
Send one crisp weekly update that answers three questions:

• What did I complete?

• What did I learn?

• What’s next?

That’s enough. No theatrics, no “look how much I’m doing.” Just clarity.
Visibility done well builds trust. Visibility done out of fear erodes it.

And when someone else still expects you to “show” effort, ask them what kind of visibility they actually need. You’ll be surprised how often no one can answer. Most people have no idea of what their own definition of efficiency is.

2. Protect Ambiguity

Our culture treats ambiguity like incompetence. If you say, “I’m thinking,” people assume you’re lost. So we overcompensate by narrating every step so it looks like progress.

Truthfully, every meaningful idea passes through a foggy middle. That’s where the idea incubates. You need to reclaim the right to not know for a while. Block quiet time on your calendar for thinking. When someone asks what you’re doing, say, “Working through the problem.” Full stop.

Stop justifying your process to people who mistake noise for motion.

3. Build Trust Loops

Most performance stems from insecurity, and insecurity stems from inconsistent trust.

You can fix this by creating your own trust loop:

Overcommunicate early → Deliver consistently → Undercommunicate later.

At the start of a project, narrate what you’ll do.
Then, deliver on time, without drama.
Once that pattern repeats, you’ve earned silence.

People will stop asking “what’s the status?” because they’ll already know: if it’s in your hands, it’ll get done.

Consistency is the only performance worth mastering.

4. Reframe Leisure as Leverage

Every culture that glorifies grind forgets this: creativity needs oxygen.
You can’t produce good work if you’ve starved yourself of input.

Hobbies, rest, reading, even scrolling through niche corners of the internet, these are inputs. They refill the tank that output drains.

So treat leisure like work. Schedule it. Protect it. Say “I’m out of office” without apology, even if you’re just out of headspace.

The world won’t collapse if you take a day off. In fact, the world might open up a little.

5. Question Your Performance Reflex

This is the most uncomfortable but the most powerful.

Every time you catch yourself doing something- saying yes, sending a message, adding a slide- ask:

“Am I doing this to deliver, or to perform?”

If the honest answer is “to perform,” pause.
What fear are you trying to pre-empt?
Whose perception are you trying to manage?

Then deliberately do less.
Let the silence sit. Let your work speak later.

At first, it’ll feel awkward. You’ll think people are noticing your absence. They’re not. Everyone’s too busy performing their own competence.

This is your edge. While others act busy, you’ll actually be building.

6. Stop Over-Explaining

Competence doesn’t need footnotes. You don’t owe anyone a PowerPoint on your process.

Start noticing how often you add qualifiers:
“I just thought maybe…”
“Not sure if this is right but…”
“Quick thought, feel free to ignore…”

Strip them out. Deliver the idea cleanly.
If you’re wrong, you’ll learn. If you’re right, it’ll stand on its own.

Confidence isn’t knowing you’re right. It’s knowing you can handle being wrong.

7. Practice Measured Disappearance

There’s a power in not being constantly reachable.
It signals control. It forces clarity. It breaks the loop of over-availability that fuels performance.

Try this once a week: pick a two-hour window to go fully offline. No Slack, no notifications.
Watch what happens. Most “urgent” problems solve themselves.

You’ll also learn how little anyone actually needs you to perform. They just need you to deliver.

8. Choose Outcome Over Optics

Every time you feel the urge to “look like you’re working,” replace it with one question:

“What would make this problem go away?”

Then do that.

If you spend your time solving instead of signaling, you’ll slowly wean yourself off the dopamine of being seen.

You’ll know you’re healing from performative professionalism when you stop fearing invisibility.

When you no longer need to prove you’re “serious.” When your calendar finally looks empty and that feels like freedom, not failure. When your sense of worth lives in the work itself, not in how it’s witnessed.

That’s the point: to let your work speak for you.
To be trusted because you deliver, not because you never log off.

Toolkit 2: How to Check Yourself When You Judge Others

If the first half of this essay is about unlearning performance, this half is about unlearning the policing that keeps it alive.

Because we all perform competence. But we also enforce it on others.

We do it subtly. We roll our eyes when someone leaves early. We whisper “must be nice” when a colleague takes a long vacation. We mistake confidence for arrogance, playfulness for immaturity, and calm for disengagement.

Every judgment you make about someone’s style of working is, in some way, a window into your own insecurity.

Performance culture doesn’t survive because managers demand it. It survives because we all enforce it by creating a panopticon out of our own internal worries.

If you want to build (or work in) an environment that values real competence, you have to train yourself to stop doing that.

Here’s how.

1. Catch the Language

The next time you find yourself saying, “They don’t seem very committed,” pause.

Ask: Based on what?

Is it because they deliver poorly? Or because they don’t perform struggle the way you do?

Language betrays bias. “Serious.” “Hungry.” “Ambitious.” These words sound objective, but they’re usually code for: “They look like me.”

We project our own performance standards onto others. We expect the same rituals of devotion. The long hours, the breathless updates, the visible stress.

Catch the words that mask your projection. Rewrite them.

Instead of “They’re too casual,” try “Their style is different from mine, so does it still work?”
Instead of “They don’t seem all in,” try “Are they delivering what they promised?”

Change the language, and you will rewire your own brain.

2. Separate Style from Substance

This one’s deceptively simple: Stop mistaking presence for performance.

The person who’s loud in meetings isn’t necessarily smarter.
The one who’s quiet isn’t necessarily disengaged.
The one who leaves early might be managing their energy better than you.

We love rewarding performance because it’s easy to see. But visibility ≠ value.

Before you decide someone’s “not pulling their weight,” look at outcomes:

• Are they delivering what matters?

• Are they consistent?

• Are they making the team better?

If yes, that’s substance. Reward it.

3. Resist Policing Passion

You know that twinge you feel when someone talks about their side project, or posts about their hobby, or builds a life outside work, and your brain whispers, must be nice?

That’s envy and you’re justifying it as moral high ground.

We judge people who seem more balanced because they remind us that balance was possible all along.

When you catch yourself doing that (AKA judging someone’s curiosity or joy), name it.

Say, Oh, I’m not angry at them. I’m angry at the version of myself that forgot how to play.

That simple reframing will save you years of bitterness.

Instead of resenting their range, learn from it. Ask what they’re learning from that side project. Notice how it spills into their main work. Curiosity is contagious if you stop trying to contain it.

4. Redefine Professionalism

We’ve built an entire culture on the myth that professionalism means uniformity. That everyone must act, dress, and communicate the same way to be “taken seriously.”

But professionalism isn’t about sameness. It’s about reliability.

You can wear sneakers and still be dependable. You can laugh loudly and still be competent. You can share memes in a deck and still have rigor.

When you judge someone’s form instead of their function, you reward samenes at the cost of effectiveness.

Redefine it for yourself.

Professionalism means this: I can count on you to deliver what you promised, with respect and clarity.

Everything beyond that is theatre.

5. Choose Trust Over Suspicion

Suspicion is a reflex in most workplaces. We assume people are slacking unless proven otherwise.

Suspicion is also inefficient. It eats up energy, time, and morale.

Trust, on the other hand, compounds. When you assume competence first, you create an environment where people rise to meet that expectation.

You can feel it immediately:
The tone of meetings changes.
People stop justifying every decision.
Ideas flow faster because they’re not afraid of looking “stupid.”

Try this micro-habit: before reacting to a colleague’s absence, delay, or choice, assume there’s a good reason. If it matters, they’ll tell you. If it doesn’t, it’ll resolve itself.

The goal isn’t blind trust. It’s default trust. Start there, adjust later.

6. Give Credit Loudly, Correct Quietly

One of the worst side effects of performative work culture is credit-hoarding.
When everyone’s busy proving value, generosity feels risky.

Deny that impulse. Make your praise public and your corrections private. You’ll be shocked at how fast trust grows when people feel seen without fear.

Real competence creates room for others. Performed competence hoards the spotlight.

7. Don’t Reward Noise

Look around your workplace. Who’s actually getting rewarded? The ones who create real progress, or the ones who look busiest?

If you’re in a position of influence, change that.
Reward foresight, not fire-fighting.
Reward thoughtful pauses, not frantic output.
Reward results, not performance.

That’s how you detox a team from hustle culture, by changing what you celebrate.

8. Ask Better Questions

Instead of asking, “Why aren’t they working harder?”
Try: “Are they working smarter?”

Instead of “Why do they seem detached?”
Ask: “Do they have the right support or autonomy?”

Good questions shift the frame from suspicion to curiosity. Curiosity is the opposite of judgment. It assumes there’s something you don’t know and opens you up to learning without defensiveness.

You’ll know you’ve started healing your judgment reflex when you stop reading other people’s boundaries as personal attacks.

When someone says, “I can’t do that today,” and you don’t flinch. When you see someone post a travel photo midweek and your first thought is, Good for them. When you stop needing everyone around you to look overworked in order to feel safe.

That’s when you’ve exited the performance, not just for yourself, but for everyone else.

Because competence, in its truest form, is collective. It’s what happens when people trust each other enough to stop acting and start creating.

Let Work Speak for Itself

If I had to sum up everything this essay has been trying to say, it’s this: you don’t owe anyone the theatre of your effort.

You don’t owe your seriousness a costume. You don’t owe your ambition a performance review. You don’t owe your competence a 24/7 livestream.

You owe it to yourself to do good work and to build a life large enough to hold it.

We’ve built a culture that mistakes display for dedication. We’ve trained ourselves to perform stress, to showcase effort, to narrate productivity. But the truth is, work doesn’t become meaningful because it looks hard. It becomes meaningful because it does something: it moves a person, a project, a company, a world forward, even in a small way.

And that rarely looks cinematic. Real work often happens in an unphotogenic moment:
The edit that makes something clearer.
The calm conversation that dissolves a conflict.
The invisible decision that prevents a future problem.

None of these show up on dashboards. But they hold everything up.

The tragedy is, we’ve confused the construction for the show. We reward those who build visibility, not stability. We hand applause to the loudest hands, not the steadiest ones.

And then we wonder why so many of us are exhausted, insecure, and disillusioned.

It’s not laziness we’re fighting. It’s performance fatigue.

The fatigue of being watched. The fatigue of translating every instinct into optics. The fatigue of treating your career like a stage instead of a craft.

But there’s a way out, and it’s simpler than it sounds.

You just… stop performing.

You do the work honestly. You let your results create your reputation. You learn to be comfortable being underestimated. You choose depth over drama. You stop chasing the dopamine of being seen and start chasing the quiet satisfaction of being good.

That’s what Sikhism taught me long before I had the language for it. Kirat karna, or to earn an honest living through honest work, is fundamentally about alignment. It asks you to work with integrity, without vanity, without deceit, and without the need for applause. You do what needs to be done because it is yours to do, not because someone is watching. In a world obsessed with optics, kirat karna is a radical concept. It reclaims dignity from display. It says: your work itself is the prayer.

Because competence, when practiced long enough, becomes its own proof.

The people who matter will notice. The ones who don’t were never your audience anyway.

When I think of the people I admire most, they all share one thing: they’re not performing. They’re immersed. They move through their work with calm intensity. They have nothing to prove because their results already speak. They make success look effortless, not because it is, but because they’ve stopped trying to convince you of the effort.

And maybe that’s the lesson I wish someone had told me earlier:
You don’t need to pantomime your professionalism. You don’t need to flatten yourself into a LinkedIn-ready avatar. You don’t need to make your competence performative to make it real.

You can love your work and still have a life. You can be serious without being self-serious. You can build quietly and still matter loudly.

In the end, the goal isn’t to look like you care. It’s to care enough that you stop needing to look.

That’s what real professionalism is: Doing what you said you’d do, with integrity, grace, and a full human heart, even when no one’s watching.

Because the only performance worth perfecting is the one where the audience doesn’t matter anymore.