Notes from the rebuild · 31
Tall poppy syndrome: why I build in public and stay quiet at home
Sunday lunch. Someone asks how the computer thing is going. You can hear the inverted commas around it. You start to answer, and before you finish the sentence someone else says "so you're not going back to a proper job then". The table laughs. The rice keeps going around.
You laugh too, because what else do you do. Then you go quiet for the rest of the meal and tell yourself you are not bothered. Then you drive home doing the argument you should have made, out loud, alone, at the lights.
Nobody at that table was trying to hurt you. That took me years to work out, and working it out changed everything I do about it.
The short version
- Tall poppy syndrome is the habit of cutting down people who stand out, and it is a national pastime here.
- Announcing a plan feels like progress. That feeling is what kills the work.
- Building in public and telling your family are two different jobs. One is a record, the other is a request.
- Strangers judge the work. The people who love you judge the risk.
- Five rules: post the work, not the plan. Pick your audience. Give family the short true version. Never sell to people who love you. Keep one number private.
What is tall poppy syndrome, and why is it so Australian?
Tall poppy syndrome is the habit of cutting down people who stand out, especially people who say out loud that they are doing well. The phrase traces back to a story in the Roman historian Livy. King Tarquin the Proud walks into his garden and sweeps a stick across it, taking the heads off the tallest poppies. It was a silent instruction to his son about the leading men of a town called Gabii. The son understood exactly what his father meant. Australia imported the image and turned it into a national sport, played mostly with jokes instead of arguments.
It is not just a feeling, and it is not just us. The biggest study on it, run in 2023 by Dr Rumeet Billan, asked 4,710 people across 103 countries about women's experiences at work. It found 86.8 per cent had copped tall poppy syndrome on the job, and 77 per cent had their achievements downplayed. Closer to home, Flinders University psychologist Norman Feather wrote the first big Australian paper on it in 1989. He called it "Attitudes towards the high achiever: the fall of the tall poppy". So it is measured, not imagined.
Here is my take, and it is a take, not a finding. Most of it is not jealousy. It is discomfort. When someone near you changes, it puts a question to everyone who did not. The joke shuts that question down before anyone has to answer it.
Why does working in silence beat announcing the plan?
Because saying a plan out loud feels like doing it, and that feeling costs you. I have watched myself do it. You announce it. You get the nods. It feels good. Then the work stops feeling urgent, because you have already been paid. Nothing kills a Tuesday faster than being congratulated on a Sunday.
Silence keeps the pressure on the work. There is nothing noble in that. It is just cheaper. You spend nothing managing other people's opinions of a thing that does not exist yet.
So why build in public at all?
Because building in public and telling your family are two different jobs that only look the same from the outside. One is a record. The other is a request.
When I publish the build, I am writing to a stranger standing in a kitchen at 11pm wondering whether it is them or the business. They do not know my old version. They have nothing to defend and no stake in me staying the same. They take the work at face value, because face value is all they have.
When I tell my family the same thing, I am handing it to people who hold a complete file on me. They knew me at eight, in a takeaway shop in Kingsgrove, barely tall enough for the till. They watched an empty shop on Enmore Road turn into Great Aunty Three and then watched it take eleven years of my life. They love me. They also still see the oldest version of me, because that is the version they have the most proof of. That is not cruelty. That is just how memory works.
Your family is not your audience. They are your people. Those are two different jobs, and handing them both is how you end up quietly resenting them for something they never signed up for.
Why I do not promote my work to family and friends
Because they are not the customer, and turning them into one costs more than it earns. Not one of my closest friends follows the business accounts. None of them has shared a post. I have never once asked, and I never will.
A friend who shares your post is doing you a favour. A stranger who shares your post is handing you a customer. Favours run out and get counted. Customers do not. The moment you start asking the people at your table to perform support, you have added a scoreboard to a relationship that was working fine without one.
There is a second cost, and it is harder to spot. Every time you argue your case, you shrink the decision down to something you can defend. You hand over a bit of your own certainty for free. I have written about that one separately in you don't owe anyone an explanation. The short version: the explanation is a tax, not a courtesy.
The five rules I actually run
This is the whole system. It fits on a napkin, which is the only reason I have kept it.
- Post the work, not the plan. Finished things only. A plan announced is a plan half spent.
- Pick the audience on purpose. Write to the person two years behind you, not to the person across the table from you.
- Give family the short true version. "I'm building something new" covers it. It is honest, it is enough, and it does not ask for a verdict.
- Never sell to people who love you. Let them buy if they want to. Asking changes the relationship and almost never changes the revenue.
- Keep one number private. Keep one measure of progress that nobody gets to react to. It stays yours, so it stays honest.
What the quiet year actually bought me
Twelve months of not explaining myself bought me a year of quiet evenings. In those evenings I built the system the whole business now runs on, got new work off the ground, and wrote most of a book I have not published yet. None of it came from a conversation at a lunch. All of it came from Tuesdays that nobody clapped for.
The funny part is what happened to the tall poppy problem while I was not looking at it. It went quiet on its own. Nobody in my family brings up the midlife crisis anymore, and I never won that argument, because I never had it. They just watched something get built instead. Evidence ages better than explanation. It also takes longer, which is the bit nobody wants.
If your own table is cutting you down right now
Do not argue with it. Do not go full hermit either. Neither one helps. Say thanks, change the subject, and go back to the desk. Keep publishing the work where the work is useful, which is to people who are where you were, not to people who remember where you were.
One day you will be back at that same lunch, same rice going around, and someone will say they always knew you would pull it off. Let them have it. They are not lying. They just did not have the evidence yet.
You were busy making it.
Questions people ask me about this
What is tall poppy syndrome in simple terms?
Tall poppy syndrome is the habit of cutting down people who stand out, especially people who say out loud that they are doing well. The name comes from an old Roman story about a ruler striking the heads off the tallest poppies in his garden. In Australia it usually shows up as a joke at your expense rather than an argument, which makes it harder to answer and easier to absorb.
Is working in silence the same as keeping your work a secret?
No. Working in silence means you do not announce plans and you do not campaign for approval. You still publish finished work, and you publish it often. The rule is simple: post the thing you did, not the thing you are about to do.
Should I tell my family I am starting a business?
Tell them the short true version and stop there. "I'm building something new" covers it. Save the full detail for the small number of people who will still be there if it fails, or whose experience can genuinely save you time. Everyone else gets the headline now and the evidence later.
How do you build in public without it turning into bragging?
Publish the work and what it cost, not the highlight. Share what broke, what it took, and what you would do differently. A post that is useful to a stranger reads as a record. A post that only flatters you reads as a request for applause, and people can tell the difference in about a second.
Sources
- Rumeet Billan and Women of Influence+, The Tallest Poppy, 2023. 4,710 respondents across 103 countries, on women's experiences at work.
- N. T. Feather, Attitudes towards the high achiever: the fall of the tall poppy, Australian Journal of Psychology, 1989.
- Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book I, for the poppies in Tarquin's garden.
The longer version of how I got here is seven chapters. Why I walked away from a business that worked is in Unemployable. The daily practice that keeps me off the approval loop is the 8S Practice. And if you are building something quietly and want an outside eye on it, that is a conversation I have with people now.