There’s a particular kind of fatigue you only notice after you’ve spent too long inside other people’s certainty.

It usually begins in a place that looks harmless. A Discord you paid to join. A “serious builders” Slack. A community where everyone seems busy, opinionated, and oddly confident about what the “right move” is.

Somewhere in that stream, a person becomes the center of gravity. Maybe they are genuinely sharp. Maybe they are charismatic. Maybe both.

People start quoting them like they are an RFC. Their stack becomes the standard. Their worldview becomes “how winners think”. Their taste becomes a template you can copy and paste into your own life.

And it feels good, at first.

Because if someone else already knows the path, you don’t have to do the hardest part yourself: decide.

You can stay in motion without being accountable to direction. You can consume without committing. You can “prepare” without risking failure.

That’s the deal. Delegated thinking that feels like progress.

This post is about refusing that deal.

Not because communities are bad. Not because mentors are scams. Not because you should build alone like a monk. People need people.

But because in the AI era, the most expensive resource is not information.

It’s agency.

So build your own compass. Stop renting your taste.

The new scarcity is not knowledge or code, it is judgment

Outsourcing decisions used to be rational.

A decade ago, information was scattered. Tooling was harder. Distribution was gated. If you didn’t have someone pointing you at the right resources, you could waste months.

Now we live in abundance.

Tutorials are infinite. Case studies are everywhere. Source code is public. AI can explain, scaffold, refactor, critique, and help you iterate in hours.

Execution got cheaper. Iteration got faster.

But brains didn’t evolve for infinite input. So what people outsource now is not “where do I learn X”. It’s “what should I become” and “what should I build” and “what should I believe”.

That is not a learning problem. That is an identity problem.

And identity problems are where gurus thrive.

Sometimes the guru is genuinely skilled. Sometimes they are a marketer with a confident tone. Either way, the mechanism is the same: they sell you a narrative that replaces your uncertainty with their certainty.

The cost is subtle. You stop exercising the part of yourself that chooses.

Renting taste looks like learning, but it behaves like paralysis

“Renting your taste” doesn’t look like worship. It looks like being strategic.

It sounds like:

  • “I’m using this framework because the smart people use it”.
  • “I’m joining this community because it’s where the winners are”.
  • “I’m waiting to ship because I want feedback first”.
  • “I’m not choosing a niche yet, I’m researching”.

This is how you can spend a year inside the “builder ecosystem” and still have nothing that stands on its own.

Because the loop rewards opinion acquisition over decision ownership.

Taste is not what you like. Taste is what you choose when tradeoffs are real and information is incomplete.

The only way to develop taste is to decide, ship, get hit by reality, and refine.

If you’re always borrowing taste, you’re always postponing the one process that builds it.

Communities are human infrastructure, pedestal culture is optional

I don’t buy the fashionable advice that says “ignore everyone” and “build alone”.

People need people.

You need peers to reality-check your thinking. You need honest critique. You need accountability. You need friends who are also builders so you don’t confuse motion with progress.

But there’s a difference between community and pedestal culture.

Community is a workshop.

Pedestal culture is a theater.

In a workshop, status comes from craft and contribution. In a theater, status comes from proximity and performance.

You can spot theater culture fast:

  • The group produces more hot takes than artifacts.
  • Disagreement feels socially expensive.
  • “Important members” are treated as default truth.
  • Newcomers can participate, but not really rise.
  • People spend more time debating tools than solving problems.

The scary part is that this can happen even in well-intentioned communities. Not because everyone is malicious, but because humans are wired for hierarchy and tech is wired for status.

When those merge, idolization becomes normal, even if nobody names it.

Leadership under a spotlight gets weird in tech

Tech culture likes to pretend it is allergic to optics.

It isn’t.

If you run a community, a company, or an event, you are not just shipping code. You are shipping a social reality. Your tone matters. Your reactions become policy. What you reward becomes the group’s culture.

And because tech often underestimates social dynamics, leaders accidentally create environments where idolization grows by default.

It usually breaks like this.

A leader posts a confident opinion. People treat it as doctrine. Someone questions it. The leader responds with impatience or sarcasm. The room learns the real rule: dissent costs status.

Nobody needs to be explicitly censored. People self-censor. Idolization becomes “cohesion”. Critique becomes “negativity”. The group stays “positive” while slowly losing truth.

A healthy leader does something harder.

They teach reasoning, not recipes. They reward contribution, not loyalty. They make space for new people to become core. They reduce dependence on themselves.

A mentor’s success metric is simple: the student becomes harder to manipulate.

The J. Cole scenario: the peak is loud, crowded, and anxious

Let’s make this tangible.

Picture the top of the mountain the way it feels from the inside, not the way fans describe it from the outside.

It’s a hallway behind a stage. Bright lights leaking through curtains. A manager whispering numbers you didn’t ask for. A phone buzzing with half a dozen opinions you also didn’t ask for. Everyone is smiling, but nobody is relaxed. You can feel it in the posture. In the way conversations don’t fully land because everyone’s tracking something else.

Up here, attention is not a nice bonus. It’s oxygen.

And the oxygen is limited.

There are only so many headline slots, only so many “album of the year” narratives, only so many placements, only so many playlists, only so many moments where the culture decides you matter. The audience thinks it’s about art. The industry knows it’s about position. The artist gets squeezed between the two.

Now zoom in on what that pressure does.

If you are a serious artist, you want to make work that lasts. You want to improve. You want to take risks. You want to grow. But the top has a brutal incentive: it rewards stability of image more than evolution of craft.

So people start managing perception.

They start choosing moves that are defensible, not just honest. They start arguing in public because conflict is a shortcut to relevance. They start interpreting new talent as threat, not as a healthy next generation. They start protecting their slice of the spotlight because everyone can feel how quickly the crowd turns.

Even if nobody says it out loud, everyone understands the quiet rule: you can’t be on top forever. So while you are there, you either build a legacy that outlives the cycle, or you cling to the cycle and let it shape you.

That’s the J. Cole framing you’re pointing at, and why it resonates. Not as poetry, as mechanics.

At the peak, the ecosystem nudges you toward status defense.

More debates. More posturing. More alliances that are friendly but strategic. More time spent discussing other people than building the kind of environment where the next wave can rise without being punished for existing.

Not because everyone is evil. Because the incentives are loud, and the attention is scarce, and ego is human.

Now translate that into tech.

Replace the stage with a conference keynote. Replace the label politics with influencer timelines and founder circles. Replace the charts with who owns the narrative on your feed. The scarce resource is the same: attention, reputation, perceived authority.

So you see the same behavior.

People forming inner circles. People supporting each other publicly while competing privately. People treating newcomers as noise until they are a threat. People preaching unity while quietly guarding access. People spending more energy on positioning than on building a healthier ladder for the next generation.

This is why pedestal culture shows up so reliably in tech communities. A crowd that worships does not question. A crowd that questions forces you to keep earning your status.

And this is why you need a compass. Not to avoid people, but to avoid being dragged into someone else’s status game.

The part most people get wrong: “Build in Public”

I agree with your conclusion, with one caveat.

“Build in Public” isn’t inherently fake. It’s a tool.

The problem is that most newcomers use it as a substitute for fundamentals.

The promise is seductive.

“Share your journey. Build an audience. Get your first sales”.

What rarely gets said.

Attention doesn’t equal trust. Content doesn’t equal distribution. Transparency doesn’t equal product-market fit. Visibility increases your attack surface. Public momentum can create fake confidence.

“Build in Public” works best when you already have a machine that can handle it.

  • A product with real retention signals.
  • Support standards and response discipline.
  • Community design with layers of access.
  • A narrative you can sustain without lying.
  • Crisis and contingency planning.

Most people launching their first thing have none of that. So “Build in Public” becomes a trap.

They expose half-formed ideas, attract the wrong kind of attention, overfit to feedback from non-buyers, and burn credibility before the product has earned it.

And they teach competitors for free.

How you lose without your competitor doing anything

Let me paint the version that happens all the time.

You’re early. You’ve never launched. You decide to “Build in Public” because it feels like movement and community.

You post your idea, the niche, the pricing draft, screenshots, the roadmap, and a launch date.

You get likes. You get “this is awesome” replies. You get a few DMs. A tiny dopamine spike. The timeline tells you you’re doing it right.

Then reality arrives.

A user finds a bug. You fix it publicly. Another user requests a feature. You pivot scope publicly. Now your timeline is a messy trail of indecision. Someone asks for a refund loudly. Someone quote-tweets you with a joke. You reply defensively because your identity is now attached to being “a builder”.

You are not just building a product anymore. You are maintaining a public persona.

Meanwhile your competitor does three boring things.

They build a smaller product with stronger reliability. They set excellent support standards in a private community. They market with restraint: clean message, steady funnel, controlled narrative.

They don’t need to attack you.

Your transparency attacked you for them.

Every public roadmap creates expectations. Every public struggle creates doubt. Every public feature plan creates a checklist for rivals. Every public failure creates a permanent receipt.

So the competitor wins without doing anything fancy. They just keep shipping. Quietly. Consistently. With standards.

This is the core irony: full “Build in Public” often helps your competitors more than it helps you.

Not because transparency is evil. Because strategy matters more than sincerity when incentives are competitive.

The pragmatic alternative: Build in Silence, then earn your right to go public

Here’s the model I trust more, because it matches how durable companies actually form.

Phase 1: Build in Silence

Validate the problem quietly. Talk to users privately. Ship a small, reliable core. Write down tradeoffs. Establish support standards. Build a contingency plan before you need it.

Silence doesn’t mean secrecy for ego. Silence means protecting the fragile phase where your product is not ready to be judged by strangers, algorithms, and rivals.

Phase 2: Controlled visibility

When you have traction signals, go public with discipline.

Share learnings, not your entire blueprint. Share outcomes, not every internal debate. Share principles, not implementation details that gift-wrap your roadmap.

This is “public” as a system, not as a performance.

Phase 3: Public as an amplifier

Now visibility becomes leverage: distribution, hiring, partnerships, credibility, ecosystem trust.

It amplifies what already works. It does not create what you don’t have.

What “excellent crisis and contingency planning” actually means

If you want to build things that last, you plan for failure like an adult.

A minimal baseline.

  • An incident playbook: what happens when production breaks, who communicates, where, how fast.
  • A refund and chargeback policy: written, fair, consistent.
  • Support expectations: even if informal, set them or the public will set them for you.
  • Data and privacy posture: what you collect, what you don’t, how deletion and access work.
  • Reputation containment: calm templates for common issues so you never respond emotionally.
  • Competitive discretion: don’t publish roadmaps that create attack vectors.

This isn’t corporate theater. It’s survival.

The market doesn’t punish you for being early. It punishes you for being sloppy in public.

The compass test

If there’s one test that cuts through everything, it’s this.

Does this person, group, or strategy increase my decision-making capacity, or replace it?

Then ask yourself.

  • Do I leave with a clearer decision, or just more opinions.
  • Can I disagree here without social punishment.
  • Do newcomers rise here, or is the top closed.
  • Are we producing artifacts, or producing content about producing content.
  • Am I using visibility to amplify a working machine, or to avoid the hard work of building one.

Answer honestly and the path gets clearer.

Closing

The AI era removed many excuses.

You don’t need gatekeepers for knowledge. You don’t need idols for permission. You don’t need loud communities to feel like you’re progressing.

You do need people, real peers, real standards, real critique.

But you also need something that can’t be outsourced: a compass.

Build in silence until your foundation is real. Then use public building as leverage, not as a crutch.

Stop renting your taste. Own your decisions.