"The Courage to Dance Unseen": "Those seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music." - Friedrich Nietzsche

What if the idea that visibility through self-promotion might not be as valuable as we often think?

(It's important to note that this is the second part of a three-part series. I’ll be discussing why I believe stepping away from self-promotion can be beneficial.)

Drawing inspiration from the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, particularly his thoughts on how the crowd can dilute personal truth and responsibility, I challenge you to reflect on the impact of performing for the masses versus living authentically.

Are we merely existing for likes and approval or are we embracing our genuine individuality?

In this second of a three-part series, I explore the juxtaposition of truth and visibility and consider the courage it takes to be unseen in a world driven by digital crowds.

If you're questioning the balance between real connections and virtual applause, this episode promises to be both enlightening and impactful.

Here are 3 key takeaways from the episode:

• Authentic Self vs. Crowd Pleasing: The more we conform to the crowd, the further we drift from our true selves. Embrace your authentic truth over crowd-pleasing performances.
• The Power of Presence: Stepping away from the chase for likes allows us to focus on meaningful conversations and personal connections that matter the most.
• Courage to Stand Alone: It's important to have the courage to live truthfully, even if it means standing apart from the crowd. Authentic existence is about being true to ourselves.

Key Moments

00:00 "The Lie of Visibility"

03:26 Living Authentically vs. Performing Online

09:34 Authenticity Over Clickbait

12:52 Authenticity vs. Social Validation

14:24 "Courage to Be Unseen"

Perry Maughmer believes the world deserves better leadership; that in every human interaction there is the opportunity to either build others up or tear them down; and that leadership is the choice we make in those moments.

These beliefs led Perry to create the Potential Leader Lab. He wanted to offer those who share his beliefs the space and safety to explore transformative ideas, experiment with new behaviors, and evolve into the leaders they were meant to be and that the world needs.

This is a framework he has used again and again with his Vistage peer advisory groups and companies like Turn-Key Tunneling, Convergint, Haughn &  Associates, I Am Boundless, Ketchum & Walton, LSP Technologies, and Ahlum & Arbor.

Perry lives and works on the shores of Buckeye Lake in Ohio, in the mountains of northwest Georgia, and on the beach in Anna Maria, Florida with his amazingly creative wife Lisa. They have 2 rescue dogs and are intermittently visited by their 3 wonderful children throughout the year. Perry & Lisa are living life in crescendo and focused on exploring, experimenting, and evolving their vision of a life they have no desire to retire from.

Copyright 2025 Perry Maughmer

Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer, and this is episode 72, the lie of visibility. And this is the for as a reminder, this is the second in a three part series. So if you accidentally tuned in and you didn't like the first one, you can probably just turn this off and skip next week as well and come back the following week when I have a great interview with Joe Boyd. So I just wanna put that out there because I don't wanna waste your time. This is, the second installment of the relentless truth stepping away from self promotion. Last week, we talked about kind of the way this is falling is last week was the what I'm gonna do, this week is the why I'm gonna do it, and then the next week will be the how I'm gonna do it. So this is the live visibility.

It'll be largely based and influenced by the writing and thoughts of Kierkegaard. Now, funny enough, for those of you that aren't familiar with, with mister Kierkegaard, what I find fascinating about this is he lived from '18 '13 to 1855, and he's got well, I'm gonna share with you some of the stuff he said about the crowd. And now imagine, he's saying this about people in the early to mid eighteen hundreds. Imagine how much more prevalent or exacerbated that might be now given what we do and how we do it with, technology and platforms. So, we're really talking about kinda we're gonna dive into what I call the lie of visibility, which is kinda like validation trap. And so we're gonna we're gonna talk about today why we kind of crave that and how breaking free from it could actually make us more grounded and intentional. So here we go. So there is a lie of visibility, and that is, Kierkegaard would say, the more we conform to what gains likes, the less we we live in alignment with our own values.

And so I I want you to think about this. So I I used to think that sharing my thoughts made them more valuable, and now I see the the value is there whether anybody liked them or not. Like and and I and and I truly believe this. And so I think a really interesting question would be, you know, would you rather have one real conversation or a thousand likes? Like, I I'd just I'd be curious. One real conversation of meaning about something you care deeply about with someone you're very interested in that means something to you or would you rather have a thousand likes? Because the amount of effort we have to put into either one of those is commensurate. Now, obviously, if you're listening, you know which one of those I fall on, which side of that. Right? And and does does do the things we post really make a difference or just feel like we've done something? It it's kinda like action versus activity. Right? It's it to me, it's like being on a hamster wheel.

It's like we're we're tired. We're running. We can check all the list. We did this. We did that. I posted this. I posted that. But did we did we really do anything? Did it make a difference? Now if it did, awesome.

Again, I did I said this quite a few times last episode. Say it right now on the front end. If I'm not saying that marketing is bad, I'm not saying the self promotion is bad, I'm simply sharing with you what I think about it for me. So I'm not telling everybody you should never do this. I'm not making this universal issue and and being and telling everybody they should stop it immediately because it's a bane of society. That's not what I'm doing. I'm sharing with you my thoughts about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it and why it makes sense for me. And if if it resonates with you and bits and pieces or just one snippet or one bullet point, that's awesome.

And it's also awesome if you say, you know, this is stupid. I'm not gonna listen anymore because I like self promoting. I like putting all this stuff out there, and it works for me. And that is awesome, and you should keep doing it. Right? But, really, we gotta think about are we when we think about all the visibility we have, are are we living our lives, or are we performing them? And it it's a subtle shift, but it matters. Because I recognize that after I stopped doing a lot of this stuff, and it's only been, you know, sixty days probably, I noticed that my focus shifted back to other things that mattered to me. And that was creating different things for people that were already my clients or doing deeper levels of preparation or doing or when I'm in with clients or in a meeting or any of those things, I'm not thinking about how this could be leveraged or perceived or what kind of shot I should take or what kind of picture I could post with, what kind of caption. I was just fully present in the meeting doing that kind of work.

And then when I went back when I went home, I didn't have a list of things I had to post and respond to and all of those things. I could just focus on the meeting, focus on the content, focus on what was gonna happen tomorrow and the next week, or what what I could do, you know, doing a little bit of reflection. What do I do differently? What what went well? What didn't go well? And I think that there is we can dive in a little now a little bit about Kierkegaard and what one of the things he said, which I I this is so profound to me. And, again, this is somebody who lived from 1813 to 1855. He said, this is, quote, the crowd is untruth. The crowd is untruth. And he argues that when individuals merge into a collective, the the crowd, or it would be in in Nietzsche's conversation, be the herd, they lose their personal sense of truth and responsibility. You know? And and they're in the this is why the crowd is untruth.

One is the anonymity and lack of responsibility. In a crowd, individuals don't feel accountable. Action taken as part of the group is kinda justified as normal or acceptable even if it's unethical because we can hide. You see this all the time on platforms. People just get they're they're able to say whatever they wanna say. And then the other part of this is mediocrity over individuality. There a crowd gravitates towards consensus, which means, you know, watering down original, bold, or controversial ideas to fit a common denominator. So you're you're gonna get you're gonna you're gonna start skewing towards mediocrity, and and the crowd is also untruth because truth requires subjectivity.

Because Kierkegaard believed that truth is deeply personal and subjective. And in the crowd, individuality is swallowed by collective thinking, and it makes genuine truth impossible because truth is subjective to the individual. We find truth in our subjective lived experience, and we lose that in a crowd. And when I say crowd, I'm talking about any kind of platform where there's multiple people. It doesn't have be it doesn't have to be a physical crowd. And that's we and for us to find our own truth about some of these things, it it's an we have to look inward and engage with our own thoughts and feelings and beliefs, and we don't do that in a crowd because we start considering the crowd's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. And I have the the second part of this is in the crowd, you lose yourself. There's an erosion of individual agency.

You're protected by that collective identity, so you may say or do things that you would not do alone. And it it's actually more comfortable to blend into the crowd than to stand out as an individual with a unique perspective. And he saw that, this comfort. This is a strong term I know. This is Kierkegaard. Right? And and I and I agree with him or I wouldn't say it. He saw this comfort as a form of existential cowardice. Right? We didn't have to deal with those feelings.

It's completely understandable. And I think his Kierkegaard's critique of the crowd is is really, really relevant when we apply it to these social platforms because we you know, things like, you know, digital crowds. That's what we're talking about. Right? Authentic voices are often overshadowed by, like, you know, popular or crowd approved content. And then we have this kind of performative consensus. They we we tend to post things that we think people will like or that will be shared, not necessarily what we believe. And this aligns with Kierkegaard's view that the crowd sacrifices truthful approval. The crowd sacrifices truth for approval.

We say things for for likes and clicks and shares and things that go viral instead of what we actually believe sometimes, or we back off of what we believe because we don't want people to be offended. And that leads to a fear of divergence. You know, we we don't want we don't wanna face that backlash because we can't do it in a civil manner either, but it seems to anymore. So we can't we can't have civil discourse anymore. So we we conform and we adopt opinions that resonate with the largest number of followers. If everybody believes it, then it must be true. And, I mean, let's be honest. Social media metrics themselves are a measure of crowd validation.

That's what social media metrics show us, how many people validated what we said. So by the very definition, it's the crowd. So what what do we have to do? We have to figure out if we have the courage to stand alone. But he insists that we have to live truthfully, and and we have to be willing to stand apart from the crowd even if it means being unpopular or isolated. Now I wanna give a caveat there just just for my own personal benefit, not for its own sake. So we don't wanna be unpopular or isolated. Again, we we don't wanna be an outlier just to be the sake of being the hot take as as it were. Because that in and of itself is trying to get validation.

Because we have a hot take, now that becomes a thing everybody talks about. And by the way, most of people with hot takes don't believe the hot takes. They're saying something that they know will generate clicks and likes and and maybe this you know, just generate conversation. They're just doing it to to pop. They're doing it to to rank. So you don't wanna be unpopular or isolated on purpose for the sake of because that's like the way of doing the thing you're supposed to do to get the thing you're not supposed to do. So when he says unpopular or isolated, he means true to who you are, true to your belief that you actually believe what you're saying 100%. And he all and also, it requires individual responsibility.

You know, genuine existence requires making decisions based on personal conviction, not popular opinion. Now what I would tell you is the first thing if you're gonna do that is you have to know what you believe. You have to clearly understand what you believe, what your values are, what your belief structure is, what you will do, what you won't do. And this is not by the way, none of this is anything that I'm telling you to do for effect. It's actually back to authenticity and subjective authenticity and subjective truth. Right? You know what you believe. This is merely a willingness to stand on that. You can stand on it on a platform if you want to, on a social media platform, however you wanna do it.

Again, I don't care if you wanna market or promote. I not saying that's bad. I'm merely telling you what I believe and and why I believe it. And I believe that if we put take take that time, energy, and attention and direct it towards things that are genuine and meaningful and actual human beings, that we would be further along for it most of the time. And and if you're one of the relentless few, you embrace being misunderstood or or even unseen and invisible because those people, those relentless few people value hard, real truth over crowd pleasing performances. Value real, hard earned truth over crowd pleasing performances. We're not we're not in it for everybody else. We're we're in it to make meaning for us and those we care deeply about.

We we wanna be that person, and that person's messy. It's we're a hot mess. Like, we're we're evolving what we believe changes, hopefully, over the course of our lives because we continue to explore and experiment and take in things and and continually find an evolving subjective truth that we have. And that takes courage. It takes so much courage for people to do that, especially now because we have to decide what we believe on an ongoing basis because of the amount of information that we have access to. And that's important. It's important for all of us. So, you know, social media kinda tricks us into thinking that validation equals truth.

And Kierkegaard would ultimately say, the more we seek to fit into the crowd, the further we move from our own identity. The real trap is sacrificing who we are for who they want us to be. That's for each of us to think about on our own. Like, that's that everybody has to answer that question. And the really, the challenge for us becomes, what would you say or what would you do if no one else was watching? Would what you do or say change? And the second part of that is so you can maintain authenticity via these platforms and still do all these things. But then the second question you have to ask yourself is, what's the return on that energy? What's the return on that investment for you personally, for whatever it is you're doing? And could you direct that that energy and attention somewhere else that could be more meaningful and and impactful? Because, you know, you can pull your own data, but I don't know of any study right now that shows that being on any social platform improves our mental health. I see plenty of them that show that it does not improve our mental health, yet we're still on it in record numbers because of dopamine, because we're afraid to walk away because we won't be relevant anymore. But are we being relevant to the people we care deeply about? To me, that's the question.

Am I is whatever I'm doing making me more relevant and connected and and and making a greater impact on the lives of the people that I care deeply about? And if it is, then keep doing it. If it's not, then can do you have a choice? Can you choose to do differently? Because as Kierkegaard said, the the crowd is untruth. So I I think that what the thing we have to think about is, do we have the courage to be unseen? Can we do it? And I'm gonna talk about that a lot more in the next episode. But I think part of this is just, you know, being being relentless means that you have to accept the fact you're gonna be misunderstood. And, I'll leave you, I'll leave you with this quote, one of my favorites from Friedrich Nietzsche. Those seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music. And there's not a more profound statement when it comes to this than that because that's authentic existence. So those seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music.

And with that, so this is second part. One more part to go. Again, one more thing you can ignore if you don't like it. Don't tune in next week. Don't do it. Don't waste your time. Come back for, episode 74 because I do have a great interview with Joe Boyd talking about storytelling. So that will be fun.

And we'll be back to having two voices instead of me droning on about things I believe. So, with that said, I hope everybody has an awesome week. I appreciate you tuning in, and, just give it some thought. And, remember, remember, truth is subjective, and you decide what you believe. Take care.