Damien Soitout
Standards when nobody is watching are the ones that count. A rule that needs an audience is still a performance.
The room is empty. The standard is whatever you do in it when the window is the only witness.
The first week of a year is noisy with witnesses. People announce what they will become. Then the witnesses go back to their own lives, and the announcement has to survive a Tuesday when nobody asks. I am writing on 2 January 2023. A standard that needs an audience is not a standard yet. It is a performance with a good costume. Standards when nobody is watching are the ones that count, because they are the ones that are actually yours.
I have written the louder version of this demand in raise your standards. That piece is about the decision to stop bargaining with yourself in public. Today is the quiet half. The room in the photograph has one person in it. There is no scoreboard on the wall. Whatever happens in the next hour will not be clipped, liked, or praised. If your rule evaporates in that hour, you did not have a rule. You had a role you play when the door might open.
The unseen hour exists in a kitchen, a cab, a night shift, a desk at home, a shop before it opens. The test is the same wherever the hour is. What do you do with the work, the word, and the person, when keeping the standard will not be reported?
Start with standards you already keep, not with a fantasy of a new personality. Most people have two or three that survive an empty room, and they undersell them because nobody claps. You answer a message you could have ignored, because you said you would. You put the tool back where the next person can find it. You tell the truth about a mistake to someone who cannot punish you and cannot reward you. Those are standards. Write them down before you invent nobler ones. A standard you already practice is worth more than a standard you announce.
Then write three lines you intend to keep when the room stays empty. I use three because a list of twenty is a performance of seriousness. Line one is how the day starts: a time, or a first action, that does not depend on a meeting. Line two is how you treat a person who cannot advance you. The cashier, the child, the colleague with no power over your name, the stranger on the phone. Line three is the quality of a task nobody will inspect. A paragraph you could have blurred. A sum you could have rounded in your favor. A corner of the work the customer will never see and another craftsperson would.
Put the three lines where you will meet them before anyone else does. A card in the book. A note at the top of the day. If you need the lines to be seen in order to remember them, they are still audience-dependent. The memory has to be yours. A routine can hold them, if the routine is a sequence rather than a costume. The morning can include the start time and the unseen task. The routine fails when it exists to be photographed. Then it is content. Content needs watchers. A standard needs you.
There are weeks when nobody is keeping score because the world is busy, tired, or looking elsewhere. Those weeks are the laboratory. You will feel the argument for an exception. You are tired. The task is small. Nobody will know. The exception is how a standard dies, not in a scandal, but in a series of reasonable afternoons. I have written about seeing the moment you choose in self-awareness and the emotional choice. Awareness is the second before the exception. It is not the keeping. The keeping is doing the line anyway, or consciously changing the line because it was wrong, not because you were unseen.
Stress is the best lawyer the exception will ever hire. MedlinePlus describes stress as the body preparing to fight or to flee, useful in a short jolt and harmful when it stays on. Its page is Stress. Under that pressure, a standard feels like an extra weight. Sometimes it is an extra weight, and a humane person lowers a demand that was vanity. Often the pressure is asking you to drop the one line that makes you trustworthy to yourself. Learn the difference. Vanity needs an audience. Trustworthiness needs the empty room. If the line was only there so you could feel important, let it go. If the line was there so your work is true, keep it when the body would rather scroll.
At work, stress is not only a private mood. The Health and Safety Executive points employers and workers to work-related stress as something to manage, including by looking at the job rather than blaming the person. That public frame matters. A standard is not a demand that you absorb a badly designed week in silence. If the work itself is the harm, the unseen standard might be to say so, or to stop, rather than to perform endurance for no witness. Do not use “nobody is watching” as a reason to accept what you would refuse if a decent colleague were standing there. The colleague test works in an empty room. Would I still call this all right if someone I respect could see the corner I am about to skip?
The World Health Organization describes mental health as a state that lets people cope with the stresses of life, use their abilities, learn, work, and contribute. You can read that description on its mental health fact sheet. A standard that destroys sleep in order to impress an imaginary judge is not mental health. A standard that lets you work cleanly when you are alone supports it. Coping includes knowing which rules are care and which rules are theater. Theater is expensive. You pay in attention you then do not have for the person in the room, even if the person is only you.
Responsibility is the plain name for the keeping. I have put it as a practice in start taking responsibility for your life. Responsibility when nobody is watching looks unimpressive. You start when you said. You do not take the small advantage. You repair the tone you used with someone who will not file a complaint. There is no medal. The medal was the tell. If you need the medal, go back to the louder piece and notice how much of the motive was being seen to have standards. Being seen is pleasant. It is not the thing.
Some habits have to go before a private standard can live. I listed a set of them in what to give up if you want the work to hold. Give up the score first, in the sense that you stop checking whether the empty hour made you look like a serious person. Keep the next verb. The verb is the line you wrote. Seriousness is a reputation. The verb is a life. People who collect seriousness without the verb are exhausting to live with, and they are exhausted, because the audience is never quite enough.
January brings the witnesses back, which is why the first days are a trap. Someone will ask for your word for the year. Answer if you like the company. Then go home and look at the three lines. The word did not start the morning. The start time did, or it did not. I have opened years with a public promise and a private drift, and the drift won by the third week because the promise was built for the person who asked. Build the line for the morning when nobody asks. If you want company later, tell them what you did when you were unseen, not what you hope the year will say about you. Hope is a pleasant guest. It does not keep a standard. An empty Tuesday does.
Today, before the noise returns, write the three lines. Keep them in the hour the window is the only witness.
