How to be ‘unknown’ but still successful

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In today’s FOMO-driven society, it’s easy to believe that to be successful, you must be well-known. For most people, though, this simply isn’t true.

Take my dad, for example. Granted, he’s 84, and long retired, but the principles around his own success as a builder remain as true today as they were 40-50 years ago.

Dad never sought the limelight. He didn’t advertise his business or join the local Freemasonry or mix with ‘influencers’ at the yacht club. Instead, he mastered his craft, made promises, and kept them. Month after month, year after year.

Over time, people noticed – and those people told other people. As a result, he was always booked up to a year in advance by clients wanting no one but Karl Fritz to build their project. In short, he let his work do all the talking for him, and his clients did the rest.

Today, it’s no different, and the approach that served him over his 50-year career has worked just as well for me. I guess a lot of it comes down to a couple of virtues some of us struggle with – patience and motive.

Resting on your work and relying on satisfied customers to spread the word takes patience.

Of course, you can always push your message out through social media, and millions do that every day, hoping for a viral hit. Most are ignored. You can also invest/squander your money on Google/Facebook/Instagram ads, and you can follow/stalk/pretend-friend those whose influence and audience you seek to leverage. But at the end of the day, nothing spells integrity quite like doing great work and then letting others sing your praises.

And granted, certain vocations lend themselves better to social media and advertising than others, especially if your sales model is one-to-many. But even then, a personal recommendation of your work carries infinitely more weight than 10,000 followers on Instagram or 50,000 ad views. And attempting to get close to influencers to advance your own goals is selfish and unethical.

Over the years, I’ve established relationships with a handful of high-profile people – many of whom you would know. In every case, I’ve invested in their work – their books, live events and courses – not to cultivate favour, but because I wanted to learn from them. I’ve praised their work in public because it has impacted and influenced my own. I’ve never asked them for anything because I’d already received my ‘reward’ each time I bought one of their products. The trade was already made – usually benefiting me far more than them. In fact, as I see it, I still owe them.

So again, patience and motive. How long are you prepared to work, interate and improve on your skills in order to master them? And why are you really doing this? It needn’t be altruistic and entirely selfless (nothing ever is, anyway), but you do need to be honest about it.

If your primary motivation is to see your book for sale in a bookstore, that’s great – own that. If you get a buzz out of seeing the light go on in other people and achieving something they previously couldn’t – great.

And believe it or not, there are plenty of millionaires out there who’ve never posted a thing on social media, or run an ad on Facebook, Instagram or Google. They are known only to a small, profitable group of clients and collaborators. My friend, Dov Gordon, is a leading expert in this field. He calls them ‘under the radar experts’.

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