Quick Summary
- Most people carry an invisible audience, and every decision passes through a second filter: how will this look? That filter runs all day, and it isn't free.
- Warren Buffett's inner scorecard is the way out: judge yourself by your own standard, and the energy spent performing comes back.
- Founders run the same trap with a different audience. For us, it's called competition.
There's an audience most people never agreed to perform for.
You can't see it. Nobody bought a ticket. But it's there in almost every decision: the holiday, the car, the clothes, the career move, the thing you say in a meeting. Before the choice gets made, it gets run past the audience.
For years, I worked in a place where almost everyone seemed to be performing for that audience. I was the outlier. And it taught me something I'd later need as a founder: the audience is the most expensive thing you never chose.
The second filter
Here's the mechanism.
Every decision should pass through one filter: is this right? Living for an audience adds a second: how will this look?
The second filter feels harmless. It isn't. It runs constantly, on everything, and every cycle of it draws energy away from the thing itself. Worse, it's invisible. Nobody sends you a bill for it. It simply feels like normal life, which is why people can spend entire careers inside it without noticing.
Warren Buffett gave this a name: the inner scorecard. Would you rather be genuinely excellent while the world thinks you're mediocre, or the reverse? Your honest answer tells you which scorecard you're running on.
The audience in your head is the most expensive thing you never chose. It charges you on every decision, and it never sends a bill.
When I stopped needing to prove anything to anyone, the change wasn't philosophical. It was practical. Energy came back. Energy I hadn't known I was spending.
The founder's version of the trap
So what does that actually mean for founders?
It means we're just as exposed. We simply have a different audience.
Inside the company, there's how we're perceived by the team. Outside it, there's how we look to clients, to peers, to other founders. And underneath both is the audience founders rarely recognise as one: everyone else in the market.
What are they charging? What did they launch? How fast are they growing?
For a long time, I thought of other businesses as competitors. And the moment you do that, something subtle happens. You start measuring yourself with their ruler. Their pricing becomes your reference point. Their offerings become your benchmark. Their pace becomes your pressure. Without ever deciding to, you start playing a game somebody else designed.
That's the founder's second filter. Not "how will this look?" but "how does this compare?"
| Decision | Measured against others | Built from your own experience |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Set by what the market charges. | Set by the value your work actually creates. |
| Offerings | Shaped by what others are selling. | Shaped by what your clients have shown you they need. |
| Pace | Driven by how fast others seem to grow. | Driven by what the business can sustain and do well. |
| Over time | Always one move behind someone else. | Every year builds on the one before it. |
No one standing in your spot
At some point, I stopped considering anyone as competition. Not as a pose. As a conclusion.
Let me be precise about what that means. There are plenty of agencies whose services would look similar to ours on a list. What we don't have is anyone we're trying to beat.
Naval Ravikant said it best: escape competition through authenticity. If you're competing with someone, it's usually because you're copying them; you're both reaching for the same spot. Build from who you genuinely are, and nobody else is standing where you stand.
That's how our business was built. Our offerings, our way of working and the way we deliver for clients were developed from scratch, out of our own experience with clients. Our workflows came from our own mistakes. Our thinking about growth came from watching what actually worked. People on any team take inspiration from the world around them, and that's healthy. But the foundations were laid here.
And when something is built from experience, it can't be copied, because the experience can't be.
The company that ignored the race
Basecamp is the clearest example I know.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson built it on principles they later set out in Rework, a book I still return to. While much of the software world raised money and raced to out-feature each other, they stayed small, stayed self-funded, and kept asking a different question: what will our customers still need in ten years? Their product often did less than its rivals, deliberately. Their advice about competitors was, in effect, an invitation to step out of the race entirely.
They didn't win the race. They declined to enter it, and built something that lasted.
The question that shows you who you're performing for
Here's the test I'd offer, and it works on both halves of this: your life and your business.
If nobody ever saw this, would I still do it this way?
Run it on a purchase, a price, a product launch, a hire, a post. If the answer is yes, carry on. If it's no, part of that decision belongs to the audience. Sometimes that's fine. But you should always know who you're really doing it for.
Why authenticity compounds
And here's the part that matters for the long game.
Imitation can't compound. When you're chasing someone, every move starts from their last one, so nothing beneath you is really yours, and you can never stay ahead for long.
Authenticity compounds by default. Your lessons, your clients, your mistakes, your judgement: each year stacks on the last, and nobody can copy the stack without living your years.
So there's nobody to beat. There's only the game you designed, played for long enough that it becomes impossible to compete with.
And that's a game you can win handsomely.
