Saturday morning, December 21st. Scrolling through LinkedIn where someone just posted their "10 lessons from building a SaaS to $10K MRR." The post has 5000 likes. Their actual SaaS has 12 customers and launched 3 months ago. They spent 20 hours writing the post and building their personal brand. They spent 30 hours building the product. The signal is drowning out the substance.

The Thesis

Signaling skill is faster and easier than acquiring it. You can look like an expert in days. You can sound authoritative in hours. You can build a brand that screams competence without actually being competent. And because modern platforms reward signals more than substance, you get more benefit from performing expertise than from developing it.

This creates a destructive dynamic: the better you get at signaling, the less incentive you have to skill-build. Why spend 10,000 hours mastering something when you can spend 100 hours learning to signal mastery and get 80% of the social rewards?

The result: A world drowning in skill signals with a shortage of actual skill. People who are better at looking competent than being competent. Expertise performance replacing expertise development.

The paradox: The more energy you put into signaling competence, the less you have left for building it. And the rewards for signaling are so immediate that building real skill starts to feel like a sucker's game.

The Skill-Signaling Gap

What Skill-Building Looks Like

The process:

  • Long feedback loops (years to see results)
  • Lots of failure and iteration
  • Unglamorous repetition
  • Few visible milestones
  • Uncertainty about whether you're improving
  • Little external validation along the way

Time investment: 10,000+ hours to genuine expertise

Rewards: Compound slowly over decades

Visibility: Low until you're actually good

What Skill-Signaling Looks Like

The process:

  • Short feedback loops (likes within minutes)
  • Curated successes only
  • Glamorous performance
  • Constant visible milestones
  • Immediate validation from audience
  • External validation is the product

Time investment: 100-1000 hours to convincing performance

Rewards: Arrive immediately and linearly

Visibility: High from day one

The Gap

The problem: In the modern attention economy, skill-signaling has a better ROI than skill-building.

Example: Learning to code

Path A (Building):

  • Spend 3 years building projects, failing, learning fundamentals
  • Most projects die privately
  • Deep understanding of computer science
  • Compound expertise
  • Few followers, little recognition
  • Eventually land great job based on actual ability

Path B (Signaling):

  • Spend 3 months doing tutorials
  • Post every small win publicly
  • Build personal brand as "developer"
  • Surface understanding with confident delivery
  • Thousands of followers, recognized as "expert"
  • Land okay job based on perceived ability and network

The kicker: Path B gets 80% of the social and career benefits with 10% of the time investment. Why would anyone choose Path A?

Why This Is Accelerating

Cause 1: Platforms Reward Signals, Not Skills

The mechanism:

Social platforms optimize for engagement, not accuracy:

  • A confident claim gets more likes than a careful one
  • Simplified advice performs better than nuanced expertise
  • Personal brand building gets more reach than quiet competence
  • Performance of expertise is more viral than demonstration of expertise

The dynamic:

  • Real expert: "This is complex, depends on context, here are 7 caveats..."

    • Audience: scrolls past (too complicated)

  • Skill signaler: "Here's THE framework for X! This CHANGED MY LIFE!"

    • Audience: likes, shares, follows (feels actionable)

Result: Platforms systematically amplify skill-signalers over skill-builders. The algorithm rewards simplicity, confidence, and consistency—not depth, nuance, or accuracy.

Cause 2: Verification Is Hard, Signals Are Easy

The verification problem:

How do you know if someone is actually skilled?

In the past: Watch them work, see results over time, get verified by peers

Now:

  • Can't watch them work (remote, async, curated)
  • Results are hard to attribute (team work, luck, timing)
  • Peer verification is gamed (reciprocal follows, fake testimonials)

What we use instead:

  • Follower count (are other people fooled?)
  • Content output (do they post a lot?)
  • Confidence level (do they sound certain?)
  • Personal brand (does it look professional?)

None of these correlate with actual skill. They correlate with skill-signaling ability.

Cause 3: Immediate Rewards Beat Delayed Ones

Human psychology:

We're terrible at delayed gratification. Skill-building has rewards that compound over decades. Skill-signaling has rewards that arrive in minutes.

The comparison:

Spend 3 hours deeply learning a technical concept:

  • Reward: Slightly better understanding (imperceptible)
  • Feedback: None (you won't know if this matters for years)
  • Status: No change
  • Dopamine: Zero

Spend 3 hours writing a "What I learned building X" thread:

  • Reward: 200 likes, 50 new followers
  • Feedback: Immediate and positive
  • Status: Visible increase
  • Dopamine: High

The psychology: Your brain treats the signal rewards as real progress. You feel productive. You feel like you're building a career. The fact that you're not actually getting better at the skill becomes invisible.

The Cost of the Gap

Cost 1: Incompetent "Experts" Everywhere

The pattern:

Someone learns the basics of a field, gets good at signaling expertise, builds a following. Now they're incentivized to maintain the expert persona rather than admit knowledge gaps. They give advice that sounds authoritative but is shallow or wrong.

Examples:

  • Career coaches with 2 years of work experience
  • Productivity experts who haven't shipped anything
  • Marketing gurus whose only successful product is their marketing course
  • Design influencers with no client work
  • Business advisors who've never run a business

The harm: People following confident-but-wrong advice. Misinformation spreading because it's delivered authoritatively.

Cost 2: Real Experts Get Drowned Out

The dynamic:

The actual expert has deep knowledge but:

  • Speaks with appropriate uncertainty
  • Acknowledges complexity and caveats
  • Doesn't have time to build personal brand (too busy doing actual work)
  • Isn't optimizing content for engagement

Result: Their careful, nuanced advice gets less reach than the confident oversimplifications from skill-signalers. Truth loses to performance in the attention economy.

Cost 3: Building Real Skill Becomes Irrational

The perverse incentive:

If you can get 80% of the rewards with 10% of the effort by focusing on signaling instead of building, why build?

The calculation:

Option A: Spend 10 years becoming genuinely expert

  • Outcome: You're very skilled, moderately recognized
  • Opportunity cost: 10 years

Option B: Spend 1 year learning to signal expertise

  • Outcome: You're somewhat skilled, highly recognized
  • Opportunity cost: 1 year

From a pure ROI perspective, Option B dominates. The market isn't rewarding skill appropriately. It's rewarding signals.

The long-term problem: Society ends up with a surplus of signal-optimizers and a deficit of genuine builders. Infrastructure degrades. Quality declines. But everyone looks impressive online.

Cost 4: You Deceive Yourself

The trap:

When you spend time signaling competence, your brain treats it as skill-building. You feel productive. You're posting threads, getting engagement, building your brand. It feels like progress.

The self-deception:

  • "I'm teaching others" (you're performing knowledge you barely have)
  • "I'm building my personal brand" (you're avoiding the hard work of getting good)
  • "I'm documenting my journey" (you're curating a highlight reel)

The damage: You stop noticing the gap between your perceived expertise and actual expertise. The signal becomes your reality.

What Healthy Skill Development Looks Like

1. Build in Private Before Performing in Public

The pattern:

Do the unglamorous work without an audience. Get genuinely good before teaching others. Earn the expertise before claiming it.

The ratio:

10:1 or 100:1 - For every hour you spend signaling expertise publicly, spend 10-100 hours building it privately.

What this looks like:

  • Build 10 projects that fail before sharing the one that works
  • Practice a skill for years before monetizing it
  • Learn deeply before teaching
  • Work without documenting every step

2. Value Substance Over Appearance

The shift:

Stop optimizing for "looking skilled" and start optimizing for "being skilled." The former is faster but caps your potential. The latter is slower but compounds forever.

Tactical changes:

  • Spend less time on personal branding, more time on craft
  • Reduce time writing about what you're learning, increase time actually learning
  • Stop seeking validation for beginner progress, seek honest feedback from experts
  • Value peer respect from actual experts over follower count from audience

3. Embrace Obscurity During Learning

The reality:

Real learning looks boring from the outside:

  • Repetitive practice
  • Private failures
  • Slow progress
  • Long periods with nothing to show

The move:

Be willing to be invisible while learning. Don't need to document every step. Obscurity is the price of deep focus.

The payoff: When you finally do share your work, it's genuinely impressive rather than performance.

4. Distinguish Teaching from Learning-in-Public

Teaching: You understand something deeply and help others learn it

  • Requires genuine expertise
  • Adds value to students
  • You know more than you share

Learning-in-public: You document your journey as a beginner

  • Can be valuable if framed honestly
  • Shouldn't be confused with teaching
  • Requires explicit "I'm learning this" framing

The trap: Calling learning-in-public "teaching" when you're still a beginner. That's skill-signaling dressed as generosity.

5. Get Verification from Skilled Practitioners

The test:

Don't rely on audience validation (follower count, likes). Get feedback from people who are genuinely expert:

  • Do actual experts in the field respect your work?
  • Can you hold technical conversations with skilled practitioners?
  • Do people with deep knowledge consider you competent?

The difference:

  • Audience validation: "People think I'm skilled"
  • Peer validation: "Skilled people think I'm skilled"

Only the second matters. The first is just successful signaling.

Takeaways

Core insight: Signaling competence has better ROI than building it in the modern attention economy. This creates perverse incentives where performing expertise replaces developing expertise.

What's actually true:

  1. Skill-building is slow, private, unglamorous—rewards compound over decades
  2. Skill-signaling is fast, public, impressive—rewards arrive immediately
  3. Platforms reward signals (confident content) over substance (careful expertise)
  4. Most people can't verify actual skill, so they rely on signals (followers, branding, confidence)
  5. This creates a world full of competence-performers and short on competence-builders

What to do:

  1. 10:1 ratio - Build 10 hours for every 1 hour you signal publicly
  2. Private mastery first - Get genuinely good before teaching or personal branding
  3. Embrace obscurity - Be willing to be invisible during deep learning periods
  4. Verify with experts - Seek validation from skilled practitioners, not audience
  5. Value substance - Optimize for being good, not looking good

The uncomfortable truth:

The market currently rewards skill-signaling more than skill-building. You'll make faster career progress by focusing on personal brand than by quietly becoming excellent. But that only works until it doesn't—when you actually need to perform, the gap between your signals and your substance becomes visible.

The long-term play:

Ignore the incentives. Build real skill anyway. It's slower, lonelier, and less validated. But 10 years from now, you'll be genuinely capable while the skill-signalers are still performing expertise they never developed.

Stop performing competence. Start building it.

The market will reward signals in the short term. But substance wins in the long term. And you can't fake your way through actually doing the work.

Today's Sketch

December 21, 2025