As children, we’re taught to equate approval with understanding. A red tick meant we got the answer right. A gold star meant you were on the right path. Silence? It meant something was off even if you couldn’t tell what. That conditioning was efficient. It taught us to calibrate our sense of rightness by how others reacted.

But it also taught us to outsource clarity. To assume that if no one nodded, we must be wrong. We weren’t taught to investigate silence. Just to avoid it.

Most people never outgrow that wiring. They build lives around approval loops. It shows up in small ways: waiting for a Slack emoji before speaking again, refreshing a post to see if it’s landed, softening a new idea because it hasn’t been pre-approved. I’ve done all of that. Sometimes I don’t even notice I’m doing it. Many years ago, I scrapped a product idea I believed in just because someone asked, “Will this scale?” and didn’t say anything after. One pause, and I folded.

This is the hidden cost. I’ve abandoned designs, rewrites, even hiring decisions because I didn’t get immediate alignment. It was just the hesitation. One blank face, and I assumed I was wrong.

But meaningful work doesn’t follow that model. Clarity no longer comes from consensus. You won’t always get confirmation that you’re on the right path. Especially not early on.

But meaningful work doesn’t follow that model. It’s often lonelier, more delayed in its validation. Clarity doesn’t always come through nods or metrics. Sometimes, the clearest ideas are the ones no one understands yet. You won’t always get confirmation that you’re on the right path. Especially not early on. Sometimes, the only thing you have is the quiet discomfort of believing in something that no one else can see… yet.

Silence can be disorienting. Especially when we’re wired to expect immediate signals. I once pitched a design direction that felt obvious to me. It was simple, clean, and clear. The response was silence. No resistance, no agreement. Just a shift in topic. I took it as failure. Months later, someone implemented the same direction without knowing I’d suggested it. I wasn’t wrong. I was early. Or maybe I was just in the wrong room.

This is the tricky part: silence can feel like rejection, but it might actually be space for the work to breathe, to settle, to be found by the right person at the right time. Sometimes, you’re not being ignored. You’re just waiting for alignment. You have to decide whether you’ll keep going before anyone tells you to.

If your work is instantly clear to everyone, it’s probably not saying anything new. Real work interrupts. It complicates what people already believe. And the first reaction to that kind of friction is often dismissal. People scoff, scroll past, or change the subject. That doesn’t make them wrong. But it doesn’t mean you are either. It just means they’re not your people. You’re saying something they haven’t heard before. Or aren’t ready for. Or don’t yet have the context to appreciate.

The irony is, the people who need your work might not like it at first. They might reject it before they realise they needed it. Some ideas take time to settle. But when they do, they stay. You hear from someone months later: “I didn’t know it then, but that was a good call.” This is how deep work moves. It travels slowly, from one person to another. It echoes long after the applause has faded.

So how do you keep going when the signals are faint?

You build for the version of you that needed this. Not the crowd. Not even the peers whose approval you think you need. Just the earlier you who didn’t have the language or the permission. That’s the only audience guaranteed to be honest.

And if the work lands, it will linger. Someone will re-read the post. Save the link. Mention it months later. I once got a message that just said, “I think I finally get it.” That stayed with me more than a hundred likes ever did. These are the precise slow signals.

This doesn’t mean you ignore feedback. Or assume confusion always means you’re right. Sometimes you’re early. Sometimes you’re wrong. But if the work opens a question, creates friction, creates disagreement, that’s usually enough. You’re not here to be universally understood. You’re here to say something a few people will never forget.

You might never know what the work actually did. You just keep making it, guessing quietly that something landed somewhere. The only thing you can control is whether you stop.