The skills gap gets all the attention.
The visibility gap does all the damage.
👉 Other people have to know that you know what you know.
Both elements matter.
You need the skills to tackle more consequential challenges. But you also need other people to know you have them.
Here’s what makes this hard: it’s almost always easier to acquire new skills than it is to effectively broadcast the ones you already have.
So you default to the safer, more comfortable path.
Keep accumulating skills. Keep deferring the harder work of making them visible.
📌 It’s the most common pattern I see in the professionals I coach.
Broadcasting what you know rarely looks like telling someone “I know how to do X.”
It looks like conversations where your experience surfaces naturally.
It looks like artifacts (posts, articles, podcasts, videos) that offer genuine value while simultaneously helping people understand what you bring.
I spent time on exactly this with a client this week.
💬 My favorite framing for why this matters comes from Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon:
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.
Information is only becoming more abundant.
The attention of potential employers, mentors, colleagues, and customers remains frustratingly scarce.
For you to succeed, other people need to know that you know what you know.
Accumulating more skills that nobody knows you have won’t get you there.
