You're reading this on LinkedIn, therefore you already know some of the highlight reels you see here each day. The "thrilled and humbled to announce this partnership". The 'record' launch that "sold out in an hour". The "six-figure month" screenshot with a tasteful "just letting this sink in" underneath. The person who apparently taught someone a masterclass in leadership on a 45 minute flight between cities, business class of course. The 5am cold plunge and the gratitude journal. The posts that are broken into single lines. For maximum impact. Some might call these proud achievers the 1%'ers.
Then there's the second type of business people. Lovely, capable people who've been "about to start" for two years. They download the free thing, join the 'gurus' $7 challenge, buy the course and get three modules in. They tinker with a logo, poll their audience on two shades of the same blue and tweak the bullet points on a sales page, that let's face it, they'll never publish. They're waiting to feel ready, waiting for a quieter month, waiting until they've done one more certification, got the right ring-light or hit the 'magic number' of followers. Plenty of activity, plenty of tabs open, nothing actually ever launched or offered.
And then, quietly, somewhere in a back office or spare bedroom turned office, there's a third group. Heads down. Not posting much. They back themselves, bring in a bit of help where it counts, ignore the shiny thing and sell to the people already in their world, with what they already have. They can feel the demand coming from their clients. They know their value and they know they're usually the bottleneck in their own business, the one thing standing between their people and the result they've been promised. They care so much about the outcome, the actual transformation for their clients, that delivering it stops being a choice. There's no other option but to keep the promise and get the goods out the door. No time for an aesthetically curated recording studio or a shiny new brand, they're 'winter-coat deep' in the spare bedroom wardrobe recording their podcast, or sitting in the car, 15 minutes into their child's 45-minute ballet class, furiously writing program workbooks. You don't hear about them because they're too busy doing the work. These are the quiet achievers.
If you're an expert with real skin in the game, a leader, a consultant, someone who's spent fifteen years actually getting good at something, you could be one of them. Most of the people I speak to could be. The thing stopping them is rarely ability. It's often the handful of stories they're telling themselves, the stories that more often than not, have started to sound like facts.
Story one: the market's saturated. There are already a hundred people teaching what I know. Sure. There are also a hundred cafes in every city, all selling coffee and people still queue. A crowded market is the clearest proof you'll ever get that people will happily pay for this. The empty 'unknown' markets are the scary ones.
Story two: everyone's already doing it, so why would they pick me? Because no one else has your clients, your stories, your fifteen years of watching what actually works and what quietly falls over. I had a call recently with a leadership coach, Doug, who put it better than I could:
Ninety five percent of leadership is the same wherever you go, he said. The last five percent is yours.
That five percent, your case studies, your judgement, your unique context, the thing you notice in a conversation that no one else would catch, that's the whole game.
Story three: online courses are dead, I've missed the wave. The lazy version is on its way out, that much is true. I spoke to a woman last month who'd signed up to a big group programme to learn how to build out her own program. She fell behind, partly the time zones and partly because she'd worked out the "coach" teaching it was actually an AI agent trained on the coach's content. Answers on tap, any hour of the day. What she was quietly missing was the human. The accountability. Someone who notices when life gets in the way, because life always gets in the way while we're building things.
The next wave in online business doesn't reward whoever uploads the most content. It rewards depth, context and being genuinely reachable. Which happens to be exactly what an experienced human has.
Something I've noticed after years of doing this: when someone's frozen, they're almost always looking in the wrong direction. Staring at the market, or at their peers, measuring themselves against a highlight reel that's never fact checked and almost always had all the boring bits edited out.
The answer was never over there on the highlight reels, or the free 2 week challenge, or the latest ringlight/tiny-mic/handheld camera equipment on the market.
It's in what your own clients actually need.
Not what you think you should be teaching, not what the person with the bigger audience is teaching. What the people already in your world keep quietly asking you for.
So if you're resonating with laying low, still circling the idea, take this as your sign. Stop researching what everyone else is doing. Stop pressuring yourself to make more content for the gram.
Simply go and ask five of your own people what they're stuck on. The answer to your next move is sitting in their reply.
Heads down. Get on with it.
