Saturday morning, January 11th. You're in a meeting. Someone presents a polished deck with clean charts, confident delivery, clear recommendations. Everyone nods. Later, you discover the analysis was shallow, the data cherry-picked, the recommendation wrong. But the presentation was excellent. Meanwhile, someone else submitted a messy Google Doc with deep analysis, important caveats, and a nuanced recommendation. Nobody read it. Here's the uncomfortable truth: We don't reward competence. We reward legibility.

The Thesis

We've optimized for appearances over reality. In almost every domain—work, education, relationships, creative output—the legible signal of skill matters more than actual skill. The person who can make their work visible, quantifiable, and impressive-looking advances faster than the person doing difficult, important work that's hard to see or measure.

This isn't conscious conspiracy. It's structural. Evaluating real competence is hard, time-consuming, and requires expertise. Evaluating legible markers of competence is easy, fast, and requires no domain knowledge. So we default to legibility.

The controversial claim: Most career success comes from learning to perform competence, not from acquiring competence. The skills that get rewarded—communication, self-promotion, producing impressive-looking artifacts—are orthogonal to the skills that produce value. Often inversely correlated.

This creates a brutal dynamic: Time spent making your work legible is time not spent making your work good. The person who wins is often the person who stopped doing the actual work early enough to have time to make it look good.

What Legibility Means

Legible: Easy to read, easy to evaluate, easy to compare.

In practice:

  • Numbers over narratives
  • Credentials over capabilities
  • Deliverables over results
  • Activity over outcomes
  • Volume over quality
  • Metrics over meaning

The legibility bias: When forced to choose between something that's good and something that looks good, institutions systematically choose the thing that looks good. Because they can't evaluate "good" without expertise, but they can evaluate "looks good" with a checklist.

Example domains:

Academic papers: Publishing in high-impact journals matters more than whether your research is true, useful, or important. The game is getting past gatekeepers, not advancing knowledge.

Software engineering: Writing clean, maintainable code matters less than shipping visible features. The engineer who closes 30 tickets gets promoted over the engineer who refactors the critical path that nobody sees.

Consulting: Producing a 60-slide deck with professional graphics matters more than whether your recommendations work. The client wants something they can show their board. Actual results take years to measure.

Job applications: Having Stanford on your resume matters more than what you learned. The credential is legible. Your actual capabilities require assessment.

Social media: Follower count matters more than quality of thought. Engagement metrics are legible. Intellectual depth isn't.

Why We Optimize for Legibility

Evaluation is expensive:

To actually evaluate competence requires:

  • Domain expertise (rare)
  • Time investment (costly)
  • Close observation (intensive)
  • Delayed feedback (uncertain)

To evaluate legibility requires:

  • Pattern matching (fast)
  • Credential checking (instant)
  • Metric comparison (automated)
  • Immediate signal (cheap)

Organizations don't have time for the first option. They batch process candidates, employees, vendors. Legibility is the only thing that scales.

Principal-agent problems:

The person doing the evaluation isn't the person bearing the cost of being wrong.

Example: HR screens resumes. HR doesn't work with the hire. If they filter out someone great because they lack credentials, HR doesn't suffer. If they pass through someone credentialed but incompetent, the team suffers but HR's metrics look fine (hired from top school, relevant experience).

The incentive: Filter for legible signals. Minimize risk to yourself. Pass the actual evaluation problem downstream.

Goodhart's Law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Citation count becomes a target → people cite papers for reasons other than quality Sales numbers become a target → people optimize for sales over customer value Lines of code become a target → people write verbose, unnecessary code

Any legible metric eventually becomes gamed. The people who succeed are the people who figure out how to produce the metric without producing the underlying value.

The Cost of Playing the Game

You're rewarded for the wrong things:

Time spent on:

  • Impressive formatting
  • Executive summaries
  • Political maneuvering
  • Self-promotion
  • Credential collection
  • Metric optimization

Time not spent on:

  • Deep understanding
  • Careful thinking
  • Quality work
  • Skill development
  • Actual results
  • Truth-seeking

The person who spends 80% of their time on legibility and 20% on competence beats the person who spends 20% on legibility and 80% on competence. In terms of career outcomes. Not in terms of actual contribution.

Competent people get exploited:

The best engineer fixes critical bugs. Nobody sees this—the system just works. No promotion.

The mediocre engineer ships a flashy feature. Everyone sees this. Promotion.

Result: Competent people do invisible, important work. They get taken for granted. Meanwhile, people optimizing for legibility capture the rewards.

Eventually, competent people learn. Either they leave for environments that value actual skill, or they stop doing the invisible work and start playing the legibility game. Either way, the organization loses.

Quality becomes uncorrelated with success:

In a legibility-optimized system, the correlation between quality and reward approaches zero. Sometimes goes negative.

Why negative? Because producing quality takes time. Time you could have spent making things look good. The person doing the best work has the least time for self-promotion. They're grinding on the actual problem.

Meanwhile, the person doing mediocre work finishes early, polishes it heavily, and promotes it everywhere. They win.

This is how institutions decay. The selection pressure favors appearance over substance. Over time, the organization fills with people who are good at looking good, not good at being good.

The Difference Between Legibility and Quality

Legible work:

  • Clean presentation
  • Clear structure
  • Confident claims
  • Simple explanations
  • Immediate impact
  • Easy to understand

Quality work:

  • Often messy exploration
  • Sometimes nonlinear
  • Heavy on caveats
  • Complex reasoning
  • Delayed impact
  • Requires effort to understand

The trap: Legible work looks like quality work to people who can't evaluate quality. So legibility substitutes for quality in evaluation.

Example: Data analysis

Legible version:

  • Beautiful charts
  • Clear trend lines
  • Strong conclusions
  • Confident recommendations
  • Three-slide summary
  • Takes 2 hours

Quality version:

  • Some messy scatter plots
  • Visible noise in data
  • Multiple possible interpretations
  • Conditional recommendations
  • Twenty-page write-up with caveats
  • Takes 20 hours

Which gets presented to executives? The first one. Because it's legible. Because executives don't have time to read 20 pages. Because confidence signals expertise.

Which is actually more useful? Depends on the decision. If the decision is high-stakes and wrong answers are costly, the second one. But it's illegible, so it gets ignored.

How Legibility Distorts Behavior

Premature convergence:

To make something legible, you have to make it clean, clear, confident. This requires pretending you know more than you do.

Real exploration is messy. You try things, you're uncertain, you backtrack. None of this is legible. To make it legible, you compress it into a clean narrative: "We analyzed X, found Y, recommend Z."

This narrative is a lie. Not malicious—convenient. But it hides all the uncertainty, the alternatives considered, the assumptions made. It turns exploration into execution, tentative findings into confident conclusions.

Organizations reward this compression. "Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions." Translation: Make your uncertainty illegible. I only want to hear the conclusion.

Result: People stop exploring openly. They compress their thinking prematurely to make it presentable. Real learning stops.

Strategic ignorance:

If you know too much, you see too many complications. This makes your recommendations nuanced, conditional, legibly uncertain.

The person who knows less gives simpler recommendations. More confident, more legible, more promotable.

Perverse incentive: Stay shallow. Learn just enough to make a decent-looking recommendation, not so much that you see all the problems with it.

This is how organizations make systematically bad decisions. The people rising to decision-making positions are selected for confident ignorance over informed uncertainty.

Resume-driven development:

"I could solve this problem simply with existing tools. But if I use a new, trendy technology, I get to put it on my resume."

The legible signal: "Experience with [hot technology]" The actual outcome: Over-engineered system, unnecessary complexity, future maintenance burden

The engineer optimizing for legibility chooses the resume-padding option. They move to a new company before the maintenance costs hit. They're rewarded for making things worse.

Metric manipulation:

If you're measured on tickets closed, you split big tickets into small ones. If you're measured on code commits, you commit one-line changes separately. If you're measured on publications, you slice one study into three papers. If you're measured on sales, you book revenue in advance and deal with churn later.

Every legible metric can be gamed. The people who rise are often the people who learned to game the metric without delivering the underlying value.

When Legibility Breaks Down

Legibility works until reality intervenes:

You can look competent indefinitely in environments where reality doesn't provide feedback. Strategy consulting, corporate communications, academic theory, middle management—domains where it's hard to measure whether you were right.

Legibility fails fast in domains with tight feedback loops:

Startups (you run out of money) Surgery (patient outcomes) Engineering at scale (systems fail) Trading (you lose money) Sports (scoreboard)

In these domains, competence catches up with legibility eventually. You can't PowerPoint your way out of a technical failure. The system either works or it doesn't.

But: Even in these domains, legibility often wins in the short term. The person who can explain why the failure wasn't their fault, who can present "learnings" confidently, often survives while competent people get blamed for illegible problems.

The Alternative: Illegible Excellence

Some of the best work is illegible:

Research that's 10 years ahead of its field (no citations until everyone catches up) Code refactoring that prevents future catastrophes (nobody sees the catastrophes that didn't happen) Teaching that transforms how students think (can't be measured by test scores) Design decisions that make things obviously simple (looks easy, therefore looks unskilled)

This work is invisible to legibility-based evaluation. The person doing it gets no credit until much later, if ever. They're passed over for promotions because their contributions can't be quantified.

What happens to these people?

Option 1: They leave. They find environments that can evaluate quality directly. Usually smaller organizations, or specific subcultures that value craft.

Option 2: They learn to perform legibility. They keep doing quality work, but they also translate it into legible signals. This is exhausting—you're doing two jobs.

Option 3: They stop caring about advancement. They focus on the work itself. This is sustainable if you can accept being undervalued.

Option 4: They burn out. They watch less competent people advance by being more legible. Eventually, this becomes demoralizing. They quit or quiet quit.

How to Navigate the Legibility Game

First, recognize it exists:

The game isn't "be competent." The game is "appear competent to people who can't evaluate competence."

Most people don't realize this is the game. They think competence should be sufficient. It isn't. Legibility matters more in most institutional contexts.

Once you see this, you have choices:

Strategy 1: Play the game consciously

Learn legibility skills:

  • Polish presentation
  • Simplify communication
  • Build visible portfolio
  • Cultivate executive relationships
  • Optimize for metrics
  • Broadcast your work

This isn't dishonest if you're also competent. You're just translating real value into signals that institutions can process. You're doing the work and making it visible.

Cost: Time and energy spent on legibility is time not spent on competence. You'll get better at signaling, worse at the actual skill. Sustainable only if you can maintain both.

Strategy 2: Find illegibility-tolerant environments

Some places can evaluate actual competence:

  • Small companies (principals see your work directly)
  • Founder-led organizations (founders understand the domain)
  • Craft-focused subcultures (colleagues can evaluate quality)
  • Research institutions (peer review by experts)
  • Open source (code quality is publicly visible)

These are rare. Most institutions default to legibility. But if you can find them, you can optimize purely for quality.

Cost: Fewer opportunities. These environments are small, selective, or niche. You might earn less or advance slower, even if you're better.

Strategy 3: Build your own game

If you're tired of optimizing for others' legibility metrics, create your own:

  • Start a company (you define success)
  • Go independent (clients evaluate results directly)
  • Build in public (audience evaluates the work itself)
  • Create art (you decide what matters)

This is high risk, high autonomy. You escape institutional legibility requirements, but you also escape institutional stability.

Cost: Uncertainty, financial risk, need for self-direction. Most people can't afford this, psychologically or financially.

Strategy 4: Strategic illegibility

Sometimes, being illegible is protective:

  • Don't track your hours (then they can't measure your productivity by hours)
  • Don't write everything down (then they can't judge you by documentation)
  • Don't commit to metrics (then you can't be held to them)

This works if you have trust or leverage. Your boss values you enough that they don't demand legibility. You've proven yourself, so you get autonomy.

Cost: Only works after you've built credibility. And credibility often requires legibility first. Catch-22.

Takeaways

Core insight: Institutions can't evaluate competence directly, so they evaluate legibility instead. Over time, this selects for people who are good at looking good, not people who are good at being good. If you don't understand this, you'll be perpetually confused why less competent people advance faster.

What's actually true:

  1. Legibility beats quality in most institutional contexts - The work that's easy to evaluate gets rewarded over work that's hard to evaluate
  2. Competence and legibility are separate skills - Being good at your job doesn't make you good at broadcasting it, and vice versa
  3. Time is zero-sum - Time spent on legibility comes from time that could be spent on quality
  4. Selection pressure favors legibility - Organizations systematically promote people who are legible over people who are competent
  5. Most career advice is about legibility, not competence - "Network," "build your brand," "communicate your impact"—these are all legibility skills

What to do:

If you're currently undervalued:

  • Audit what you're optimizing for (competence vs. legibility)
  • Ask: Is my work visible to decision-makers? If not, either make it visible or find new decision-makers
  • Learn to translate quality into legible signals without sacrificing the quality
  • Keep a "brag document" of your wins—your memory isn't legible; written artifacts are
  • Consider: Are you in a domain where competence can eventually be evaluated, or will legibility always dominate?

If you're evaluating others:

  • Resist the temptation to default to legible signals
  • Build evaluation systems that measure actual outcomes, not proxies
  • Create space for illegible excellence (research time, refactoring sprints, deep work)
  • Reward people for work that prevented problems, not just work that solved visible problems
  • When someone presents confidently, ask what they're uncertain about—this reveals whether they understand or they're performing

If you're building an organization:

  • Design feedback loops that let reality evaluate people, not just managers
  • Make important work visible without making visibility the goal
  • Hire for ability to learn, not credentials
  • Create small teams where principals can evaluate quality directly
  • Resist metric proliferation—every new metric is a new thing to game

The uncomfortable reality:

You probably need to play the legibility game to some degree. Pure competence without legibility leads to undervaluation. But pure legibility without competence leads to fraud—and eventual exposure.

The balance: Be competent enough that you can deliver when reality tests you. Be legible enough that you get opportunities to be tested. Neither alone is sufficient.

The deeper problem:

This isn't just about your career. It's about the functioning of institutions. When organizations systematically select for legibility over competence, they accumulate incompetent people in positions of power.

This is how bureaucracies ossify. How corporations stagnate. How governments fail. The people at the top are selected for looking good in meetings, not for being good at their jobs.

You can't fix this alone. But you can be aware of it. You can resist it in your own decisions. You can build pockets of competence-valuing culture. You can refuse to play the pure legibility game even when it costs you.

Because someone has to do the real work. Someone has to fix the invisible bugs, write the careful analysis, teach with nuance, build for the long term. If everyone optimizes purely for legibility, the whole system collapses.

Be the person who's actually competent. But also be legible enough to get the resources to exercise that competence. That's the game. It's not fair, but it's the one we're playing.

Today's Sketch

January 11, 2026