The People Who Love Your Work Are Usually Not the People Who Can Promote You

Here is a quiet trap that catches good people for years. The people most thrilled with your work, the peers, the customers, the direct collaborators, are not the people who decide your next move. And the people who decide your next move have often never seen the work at all. Your best output happens two levels below where the decision gets made, and nobody is carrying it upward.

So you do what feels responsible. You do more excellent work, in the room where it is already appreciated. And you are quietly starving the only room that matters for what you want next. More value where it is already understood does nothing for a decision made somewhere you are not.

This is the visibility gap, and it is not a volume problem, it is a routing problem. The fix is not producing more. It is making sure the work you already do reaches the people who decide, in terms they can repeat when you are not there. That is a different skill than doing the work, and almost nobody is taught it.

If you are not sure whether your gap is visibility or something else, that is exactly what the quiz reads. Two minutes, and it is free.

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Onward, Laurie