Leadership in the Dark
Validation is the world’s most addictive drug. Stronger than nicotine, deadlier than fentanyl. Unlike opioids, it’s free and infinite. A like. A clap. A retweet. A “great job, boss” in the Monday standup. And like all drugs, validation rewires your brain until you can’t function without the next hit.
But here’s the kicker: leadership requires the opposite. The leaders who matter most learn to work without validation. They write when nobody’s reading. Build when nobody’s watching. Train when nobody’s cheering. They find the courage to work in the dark, because they know the spotlight is temporary, but the work is permanent.
The Currency of Courage
We confuse talent with courage. Talent is Instagrammable. It shows up as highlight reels, viral resumes, and fast promotions. Courage doesn’t trend. Courage is grinding out a project when your boss has already moved on. Courage is hitting the gym after three days of rejection. Courage is sending the 17th investor update when the first 16 were ignored.
Most people won’t do it. Why? Because courage doesn’t come with dopamine hits. It comes with silence. Leadership is the willingness to look stupid for an uncomfortably long time. That’s what separates those who eventually shine in the light from those who flicker out in obscurity.
The Myth of the Audience
We’ve built a culture obsessed with applause. Performative leadership is everywhere: the manager who wants credit for “supporting the team,” the founder who spends more time tweeting vision threads than building product. They’re not leading, they’re auditioning.
The myth is that an audience makes the work matter. The truth? The work makes the audience. J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter in cafés nobody cared about. Jobs and Wozniak built the Apple I in a garage that smelled like motor oil. Rosa Parks didn’t wait for cameras before refusing her seat. They didn’t have validation. They had conviction.
If you need applause to keep going, you’ll stop when the applause stops. That’s not leadership — that’s karaoke.
The Dirty Work Nobody Sees
Real leadership is often unsexy. It’s not the TED stage or the shareholder letter. It’s the decision nobody claps for: firing the wrong person, telling a co-founder the truth, canceling a product after burning millions. These don’t earn likes. They earn silence. Sometimes hostility.
And that’s the test: can you lead when the only feedback you get is indifference — or contempt? Most can’t. That’s why most are managers, not leaders. Managers optimize for optics. Leaders optimize for outcomes.
Training Without Cheering
We live in a society obsessed with optics of training. Gym selfies. Strava screenshots. “Grindset” hashtags. Training isn’t supposed to be about validation. It’s supposed to be about transformation.
Leadership training is no different. The reps that matter most happen off-stage: listening instead of talking, apologizing when you’re wrong, reading when others are scrolling. Nobody will cheer you for reading Drucker at 11 p.m. or journaling through your own bullshit at dawn. But those invisible reps compound into credibility and competence.
The paradox of leadership: the louder you need to announce your grind, the less people believe it.
Silence Is the Crucible
Silence isn’t emptiness. It’s a crucible. The silence of no one reading your blog. The silence of investors not replying. The silence of your team after you give a hard truth. Most people interpret silence as rejection. Leaders interpret silence as incubation.
Working in the dark forces you to test your conviction. If the only thing keeping you going is applause, you’ll quit. If what keeps you going is belief in the work, you’ll endure. And endurance is the unfair advantage.
Think about the startups that look like “overnight successes.” They were usually 7–10 years of dark work before a sliver of light. Amazon went years before profit. Netflix mailed DVDs while Blockbuster executives laughed. Endurance through silence forged them.
Shining in the Light
Here’s the irony: the longer you’re willing to endure obscurity, the brighter the spotlight when it comes. The market rewards compounding. One blog post won’t change your life. 500 posts over 10 years might. One product launch won’t change the industry. Ten relentless iterations might.
The leaders who shine in the light are the ones who spent the most time in the dark.
Practical Takeaways
This isn’t philosophy: it’s a playbook. Three steps to build your “dark leadership” muscle:
- Detach from applause. Delete the metrics that don’t matter. Stop checking likes. Start checking whether you shipped, wrote, learned. Measure inputs, not validation.
- Schedule solitude. Block time for work nobody sees. Write a page daily. Call a mentor weekly. Read offline. Build a product feature without announcing it. Silence compounds.
- Choose conviction over consensus. If you’re leading right, someone will hate your decision. If everyone loves it, it’s probably mediocre.
The Leadership Dividend
In the end, leadership isn’t about charisma, talent, or vision boards. It’s about courage in the absence of applause. It’s about building without an audience. Training without an audience. Leading without an audience.
The dividend is credibility. Teams follow leaders who don’t need constant validation. Investors back founders who grind without recognition. Children respect parents who model resilience, not performance.
The world doesn’t need more performers. It needs more leaders willing to work in the dark.
And when the light comes — when the book sells, the product scales, the team thrives — people will call it talent. But you’ll know the truth. It wasn’t talent. It was courage.
Hi, I’m Brian Fink, the author of Talk Tech To Me. If you like how I write, preorder my newest book, Talk Tech To Me 2.0 available October 6, 2025.
