About Ostriches, Impostor Syndrome, and Personal Branding
Or why a founder who is genuinely good at what they do will not always feel comfortable being visible, while overconfidence can create a lot of public noise.
Before anything else, just so this does not get misunderstood: I am not saying that everyone who is visible is noise and everyone who is quiet is valuable. That would not be true. There are very good people who understood early on that it was worth standing with their heads up, and they do it honestly, with something real to show. In fact, they are one of the reasons industries change for the better. And there are quiet people who stay quiet for reasons that have very little to do with modesty. I am talking here about something narrower: entrepreneurs who have genuinely built something, who are good at what they do, and who still stay hidden, especially in an industry whose general reputation has been affected by noise. This article is about them.
Here is something I learned recently: the image of the ostrich burying its head in the sand to ignore danger is actually a myth. When there is a threat, an ostrich either runs, very fast, or lowers itself to the ground to become harder to see. And from a distance, when it bends its head toward the nest it has dug into the ground, it can look as if it has buried its head in the sand. But it is not hiding. It is bent over something.
I keep thinking about that, because it feels almost too accurate as a description of something I often see in others, and in myself. People who seem to be hiding are, very often, not hiding at all. They are doing the careful, unglamorous work that, from far away, can look strikingly like absence.
Visible and invisible, in the same industry
In almost every profession, you meet both types, even if you have never placed them side by side.
The first type is everywhere. They have an opinion about everything, including fields that are not theirs, delivered with total certainty, and they do not seem to have ever met a topic they did not feel fully qualified to comment on. To stay with the metaphor, they are the most visible part of the ostrich, impossible to miss from a distance.
The second type is much harder to see, because they are the ones who ask a question before giving an answer, check one more time before making a claim, and have enough experience to know how much they still do not know. Their head is, metaphorically speaking, in the sand. Not hidden, but bent over the work.
And this is where we arrive at the uncomfortable part, the one many of us feel: simple, firm, easily shareable messages travel faster, and that gives an advantage to those who communicate with more certainty. But the fact that something travels faster says very little about the quality of the content. Visibility and competence are not the same thing, although from a distance they can look identical.
Not modest versus arrogant, but discernment versus certainty
I want to stay with this for a little while, because it is tempting and easy to fall into the trap of dividing the world into competent people and incompetent people. That is not really the point here.
Many of the people I respect most do not have impostor syndrome in a clinical sense. They simply understand complexity. They know how many variables exist in a decision. They know how many things they do not know. They know that a business or a profession cannot be reduced to a short post. From the outside, they may look unsure. In reality, they are often just more careful.
At the same time, there are people who issue certainties about almost anything and who, from the outside, look like experts, when in reality they are sometimes just more comfortable with simplification than with nuance.
There is a documented phenomenon behind this. In one of its forms, it is called overconfidence, the bias that does not necessarily mean a person is incompetent, only that they overestimate how well they understand something. There is also a subtler and fascinating version of it, the illusion of explanatory depth, where people believe they understand something much better than they actually do, until they are asked to explain it and discover, awkwardly, that what they had was only the impression of understanding.
And, since we are talking about ostriches, this is exactly where the metaphor turns around beautifully and becomes more truthful: sometimes the head is in the sand because someone is checking something carefully, and sometimes the head is held high precisely because the person does not even know there might be something worth checking.
What is lost when good people stay quiet
Now comes the part that shows why this is not just a discussion about ego, but one with real consequences.
I work with founders, and I hear some version of the same sentence much more often than you might imagine, especially lately: “I do not want to hear about marketing anymore.”
It comes from people who have invested years and money trying to make marketing work. They have worked with agencies, freelancers, internal people, campaigns, and a lot of promises. At some point, they became tired and reached a conclusion that made perfect sense from where they were standing: the problem is marketing itself.
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But I keep wondering whether the real problem is that they were mostly exposed to the loudest part of the industry. Because the people who publicly promise a lot, to anyone, about anything, are much easier to notice than the ones who first check the context.
Marketing is simply the example I know best, but the principle works similarly in other industries. Think of any profession where you have heard someone say, “They are all the same”: lawyers, recruiters, real estate agents, coaches. Every time, behind that generalization, there is the same mechanism. The person was exposed to the loudest part of the profession, because that is the part that is easiest to see.
And this is the core of what I am really writing about. When good people in an industry stay hidden, they are not the only ones who lose. The founder looking for a solution loses too. They make a decision based on what they can see and end up believing the whole industry looks the same.
An entire profession ends up being judged by its loudest part, and the loudest part is not always the part that delivers with quality or honesty.
If you are one of the quiet, good ones, your silence is not neutral. It leaves an empty space that someone else will fill, someone louder and, sometimes, weaker or less discerning. And many of the people looking for a solution will make decisions based on what they find quickly, not on what you could have been for them.
So what do we do with impostor syndrome?
Now let’s turn the situation around, because this is the part I know from the inside, not just from observation.
If you are a prudent founder or specialist, you often end up facing a constant and demoralizing signal: the work you take seriously reaches ten people, while someone else’s opinion, expressed with more certainty, reaches thousands. On LinkedIn, and on other social media platforms too, this is especially visible. Slowly, without realizing when it happened, you start to believe that not being seen is a verdict on your value, when in reality it is often just a feature of how a feed works.
This is where I think one of the quietest forms of self-censorship appears. It does not whisper that you are bad at what you do. It does not tell you that you have no results or that you have not built anything valuable. It simply tells you that you should check one more thing, that maybe you need a little more time, that there is another resource to read, another idea to clarify, another sentence to improve. It tells you that everyone is already talking about this topic and that you probably have nothing truly new to add.
It sounds reasonable, and that is exactly why this self-censorship is so convincing.
So you keep your head in the sand and continue working invisibly. You turn things over one more time, check again, postpone a little longer. And you call it modesty, when sometimes it is also a form of fear.
I know this because I do it too. I tell the founders I work with that their personal brand exists anyway, whether they like it or not, and that it is better to shape it consciously than to leave it to chance. And then I do the exact thing I warn them against. Experience does not make this reflex disappear. It only makes it easier to justify.
The tension I have not fully solved
And this brings me to the dilemma I have not fully untangled yet, and I will not pretend I have, because that would be exactly the kind of manufactured certainty I am writing about here.
How do you become visible without becoming one of the people who are ONLY visible?
The easy move is available to all of us: post more, cut the nuance, replace the condition with a firm statement that travels further. It works. The reach is very real. But each step in that direction can slowly take you further away from the person you actually want to reach. For example, the mature, skeptical person who has already been burned once or several times and can smell manufactured certainty from far away.
That person is not looking for the loudest voice in the room. They are looking for someone who sounds as if they have actually carried the weight of a difficult decision.
Where I have landed, for now
I do not think the answer is to become louder. I think the answer is to stay specific, stay honest, and accept that the audience you want is precisely the harder one to reach, because they are careful and prudent too, just like you. And if you are one of the careful and competent ones, a founder or a specialist with your head bent over the work, especially in an industry people have come to distrust, I understand very well why you stay hidden. I do it too.
I just think the ostrich is worth remembering for the other reason as well: it is not actually hiding. And when more good people in an industry lift their heads, what the world sees of that industry slowly starts to change.
Maybe it is worth taking your head out of the sand from time to time, not to compete with the noise, but simply so the people looking for someone like you have at least a chance to find you.
P.S. Keeping your head in the sand does not make you more modest. It just makes you harder to find.
