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The most powerful people I know share one strange trait:
They never tell you what they’re working on.
Not because they’re secretive or paranoid. Not because they don’t trust you. But because they understand something most people don’t:
Every word you speak about what you’re going to do drains the power to actually do it.
I once knew a guy who spent three years talking about the novel he was going to write. He had the plot mapped out. The characters fully developed. He’d tell anyone who’d listen about his protagonist’s journey, the themes he was exploring, the publishers he planned to approach.
He never wrote a word.
Another friend launched seven different “businesses” on social media before any of them existed. Posted mockups, shared his vision, collected followers, built anticipation. Six months later, he was working at a corporate job, his entrepreneurial dreams buried under the weight of his own announcements.
Then there’s Maria. She disappeared from social media for eighteen months. When she resurfaced, she had a published book, a six-figure business, and a completely new life. When I asked her how she did it, she said: “I stopped talking and started doing.”
There’s a reason why every wisdom tradition speaks of the power of silence.
Not just as a spiritual practice, but as a practical principle of manifestation.
The Neuroscience of Announcement
Here’s what happens in your brain when you announce your plans:
You get a hit of dopamine—the same neurochemical associated with achievement. Your brain, in its infinite efficiency, marks the goal as partially accomplished. You feel the satisfaction of completion without the effort of execution.
Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer calls this “social reality”—when sharing your intentions creates a premature sense of accomplishment. Your brain thinks it’s already done the work because it’s received the social validation that usually comes after work is completed.
The more people praise your plans, the less likely you are to execute them.
The more you talk about what you’re going to do, the less motivated you become to actually do it.
This isn’t a bug in human psychology. It’s a feature that’s been weaponized against you.
The Ancient Understanding
Long before neuroscience discovered the dopamine trap of announcement, philosophers understood the relationship between speech and power.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the most influential philosopher of language, ended his masterwork Tractus Logico-Philosophicus with a single line that changed how we think about the limits of communication:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
But Wittgenstein wasn’t just talking about the ineffable. He was pointing to something more practical: the things that matter most—love, purpose, the work that defines us—are often degraded by discussion.
In his later work, Wittgenstein wrote about the “primacy of deed to word.” Action comes first. Language comes after. When we reverse this order—when we speak before we act—we corrupt the very thing we’re trying to create.
Goethe understood this when he wrote in Faust: “In the beginning was the deed.”
Not the word. The deed.
The philosophers knew what the neuroscientists have now proven: speaking about your intentions is the enemy of executing them.
The Modern Announcement Economy
We live in a culture that has turned announcement into performance art.
Social media feeds are graveyards of abandoned dreams, lined with posts about projects that never materialized, goals that were never pursued, visions that evaporated the moment they were shared.
Everyone’s building “in public.” Everyone’s sharing their journey. Everyone’s documenting their process.
And almost nobody’s actually finishing anything.
This isn’t an accident. The attention economy profits from your plans, not your completion. Every announcement generates engagement. Every abandoned project generates more content. The platforms don’t care if you follow through—they care if you keep posting.
You’ve been conditioned to confuse documentation with creation, announcement with achievement, sharing with succeeding.
But the most powerful creators work differently.
The Silent Masters
Steve Jobs famously operated under extreme secrecy. Apple employees signed NDAs that could end careers. Projects were compartmentalized. Even senior executives often didn’t know what other teams were working on.
When asked why, Jobs said: “We don’t talk about what we’re going to do. We talk about what we’ve done.”
This wasn’t just corporate strategy. It was an understanding of how creation actually works.
Einstein spent years developing his theories in private, sharing them only when they were complete. Darwin worked on On the Origin of Species for twenty years before publishing, telling almost no one about his ideas. Tesla would envision entire machines in his mind, test them mentally, improve them in silence, and only then build them in reality.
These weren’t coincidences. They were methods.
The silence wasn’t just protecting intellectual property. It was protecting the creative process itself.
The Energy Economics of Creation
Think of your motivation as a finite resource—a battery that needs to be carefully managed.
Every time you announce what you’re going to do, you drain that battery. You get the emotional payoff without the work. Your brain releases the reward chemicals prematurely, leaving you with less drive to actually execute.
But there’s something deeper happening.
When you speak about your work before it’s complete, you invite the world to shape it. Other people’s opinions, questions, doubts, and suggestions begin to influence your vision. What started as pure creative impulse becomes contaminated by external input.
The work becomes less yours and more... collaborative. Which sounds nice in theory but is often death to the thing you actually wanted to create.
Silence protects your vision from the committee of other people’s minds.
The Alchemy of Solitude
The lessons I need you to understand, is that real work happens in private.
Not because the work itself is secret, but because the process of creation requires a kind of solitude that announcement destroys.
When you’re working in silence, you’re in direct dialogue with the work itself. You can hear what it wants to become. You can feel where it wants to go. You can sense what it needs from you.
The moment you start talking about it, you’re no longer listening to the work. You’re listening to other people’s reactions to your description of the work, which is a very different thing.
This is why writers lock themselves away to write. Why entrepreneurs work on their ideas in secret. Why artists have studios with doors they can close.
Not because they’re antisocial, but because creation is a conversation between you and the universe, and that conversation requires silence to hear the other voice.
The Practice of Powerful Silence
So how do you harness this power?
Stop announcing your plans. Start them instead.
Work on your projects in private until they’re substantial enough to speak for themselves.
Share your results, not your intentions. Show what you’ve built, not what you’re building.
Let your work be the announcement of what you’re capable of.
Trade the dopamine hit of social validation for the deeper satisfaction of actual completion.
Protect your creative energy from the energy vampires of premature feedback.
Become comfortable with being misunderstood in the short term so you can be undeniable in the long term.
This doesn’t mean never collaborating or seeking input. It means being strategic about when and how you invite the world into your creative process.
It means understanding that the most powerful word in your vocabulary is often the one you don’t say.
The Ultimate Test
Here’s how you know if you’re truly committed to something:
Can you work on it without telling anyone?
Can you make progress without posting about it?
Can you develop your vision without seeking validation?
Can you endure the solitude of creation without the comfort of announcement?
If the answer is no, then you’re not building something. You’re performing the building of something. And performance, no matter how convincing, is not creation.
The real builders work in silence until the work speaks for itself.
The real creators understand that the power to manifest exists in inverse proportion to the need to announce.
The real visionaries know that “whereof one cannot speak”—because it’s not yet real enough to speak about—”thereof one must be silent.”
Your next great work is waiting for you.
But it’s not waiting in your Instagram posts or your dinner party conversations or your networking events.
It’s waiting in the silence. In the private space where intention meets action without the corrupting influence of other people’s attention.
The question is: are you brave enough to go there?
Are you strong enough to work without applause?
Are you confident enough to create without constant validation?
Your power is in proportion to your silence.
Use it wisely.
Thank you for reading.
– Scott