Effort is private, Opportunity is public - Architects Instruction 001

Описание: Welcome to Architects Instruction issue number 001, a newsletter where I provide actionable ideas to help you build a happy, healthy & wealthy career in Architecture and the Built Environment.

Building up to the end of the year, I found myself in an incredibly familiar and slightly uncomfortable cycle
I was knee deep in ‘doing.’ I had my head down: working, delivering, solving problems and trying to hit deadlines. From my point of view, I was being efficient, but from the outside, I had gone completely silent.
At one point, my wife Emma stood in the doorway with a coffee in her hand
‘Wow, you’re being so productive,” she said “I feel like you’ve been at that desk all week….what are you working on?’
She could see the effort, but she had no idea what I was achieving or why I was actually doing it. I was so focused on the output that I had stopped sharing, stopped communicating and hadn’t come ‘up for air’
This was another stark reminder of an age-old logic, if people don’t know what you’re doing they can’t respond to it. It’s the same story whether you a business owner like me, looking for the next project or a designer looking for your next promotion. The risk of hyper-focus on the work over everything else and the assumption that if we stay busy, head down, delivering the work the environment around us will naturally reward us.
We are all guilty of this; some of us spend our entire careers doing it, only to end up burnt out and frustrated rather than taking control.
Effort is private, Opportunity is public
Your career doesn't respond to how hard you're working; it responds to signals. If the people around you, your directors, peers and even clients don’t understand what you are doing or why it is important or even matters, there is nothing for them to act on. In many cases, that invisible effort is wasted effort.
Over Christmas, I re-read the book “F*ck Being Humble” by Stefanie Sword-Williams, an exploration of ego, but in a good way. I go back to it when I need a bit of a kick. It’s a reminder that self-promotion isn't a bad thing, it’s the realisation that when you don’t articulate your value, you leave it up to interpretation and chance.
So where do go from here - particularly when this self-promotion thing doens’t come naturally?
Well, stop thinking about it as a personality trait. Think about it as a professional skill. And like any skill, whether it’s Revit modelling or hand sketching, we just practice it, little and often.
If you are looking to ‘signal’ in your own career this week, here are a few low-effort ways to start:
-Speak up in a meeting: add context to a topic. Don’t just show a detail, explain the why behind it, the logic
Share a short insight: post a photo from your site visit in your team's channel or a material you found while doing research for your project.
Offer an idea: speak up in a design review, even something small but helpful
Teach something: help someone in the office, mentor and share a small insight from your experience
Start a conversation: start with a question at the tea point, ask what they are working on.
Go for a coffee: build a genuine connection with someone, a colleague or collaborator
Share an idea online: just one, a small, insightful idea from your work or day
None of this is necessarily about ‘self-promotion’ in the caricatured sense; it's about making yourself and your thinking legible. Helping the system around you respond, see who you are, why you are interesting and important.
They are tiny things, five minutes at a time, but over months and years, these small signals build trust and advocacy that lead to opportunities.
Give it a try, let me know how it goes, and I will speak to you next week
Thanks
C