Fear of disappointing people you've already impressed is more paralyzing than fear of impressing nobody at all.
On encore anxiety.
There’s a special kind of hell for anyone who has tasted appreciation for their work, especially in public. It’s not the obvious torment of abject failure. That’s too straightforward, too clean. Rather, it’s the exquisite agony of knowing people are waiting for you to be brilliant again, and you’re not entirely sure how you pulled it off the first time. I’ve come to think of this, affectionately, as encore anxiety.
The first time I tried stand-up comedy, I was strategic about it. I picked an open mic night at a club I didn’t belong to in a neighborhood I’d never visit — no chance of running into anyone from my real life. I was nervous about making a fool of myself, yet there was a lightness in knowing I could fail anonymously.
My set lasted three minutes. My closer landed a loud groan that devolved into laughter as the audience connected the dots. To my surprise, I did well. By the second time, I was plugged into the local comedy circuit, knew some regulars, had even made a friend. My timing was better. Yet I found myself more nervous.
The first time, I performed for nobody. The second time, I performed for people who expected something of me. And the moment you’re expected, you’re exposed.
Encore anxiety haunts every creative field. Success creates pressure to repeat, and that pressure quickly paralyzes. Startup founders, novelists, podcasters, posters. Musicians after a breakout album, filmmakers after a hit, athletes after a record season. Most writers I know get encore anxiety — a great essay burdens the next.
Impostor syndrome gets all the attention, but encore anxiety is its cruel foil: not the fear that you're a fraud, but the fear that you're genuine and still might not be able to prove it. The difference in attribution matters to the dominant psychology at play: the impostor fears their past success was luck; the encore-anxious person believes it was skill and yet fears they can't summon it again at will.
Either way, there’s a focus on what others are thinking. When no one knows your name, there’s infinite possibility. Anonymity is strangely freeing. Hopeless enough to be hopeful. Affords you the luxury of unlimited creative risk. But the moment you impress someone, namely someone you respect, you've created something scarier than failure: personal expectation. (This isn’t just a professional phenomenon; it applies to your personal life too.)
You start thinking of your creative reputation like a stock portfolio. With no track record, it's worth zero. You can take any risk because bad work costs nothing; it's actually good for you. But once you create value — a $100 idea, a $1000 hit — everything changes. Zero-value portfolios are fearless. It’s the valuable ones that are fragile. Every new asset you introduce becomes a potential market correction.
Social media democratized this torture. The pressure to go viral is one thing; post-viral paralysis is another. You stare at the compose box trying to replicate lightning, wondering if anything will live up to that moment the algorithm smiled at you.
The cruelty is compounded by converging forces. The algorithm punishes latency; skip a week and it abandons you. Humans do too; your fans and followers expect consistency and constant output. You’re caught between maintaining momentum and maintaining quality, with neither machines nor people tolerating the pauses, the meandering, the volatility that novelty demands. Add to this that we're living in a time when it feels like every permutation of everything has already been done.
The audience infiltrates the process. You feel their presence, second-guessing every creative act before it's taken. Your private thinking space becomes a stage for an imagined crowd. We’re not far off from having AI versions of our audience embedded in our workflow. The damage is the loss of internal creative solitude.
Perhaps worse than the primary anxiety is the secondary drain: the cognitive load of parsing competing criteria from your many constituents. Constant calibration and self-monitoring drains the spontaneity that first made your work compelling.
Success transforms your audience into an anonymous "they" that become your creative authority. You stop asking what you want to make. You start asking what one with an audience should make. This slides into audience capture — slowly reshaping your work to match expectations, even pushing you to abandon what would make you happy in pursuit of what would fit your brand.
It is particularly interesting to note down who you most fear disappointing. For some people it might lean towards abstract social judgment at scale. For many though, there is a hierarchy of people whose opinions they really care about. You might have tens of thousands of readers but there are really just 10 whose esteem you hold in high regard. It’s incredibly useful to know who makes this cut and why, and to interrogate whether they even should.
If you're any good at what you do, you face encore anxiety often. In one way, it’s helpful to correlate it to ego, to be self-aware of the cycles in which you feel like you’ve something more to lose than ‘usual.’ What’s the expression? Nothing is ever as good as it seems or as bad as it seems? Nothing definitively makes you and nothing definitively breaks you. Temper the upswings to temper the downswings.
The best seem to understand the traps intuitively, or at least learn to over time. They treat each piece of work as independent rather than sequential. They've learned that trying to protect past work is the enemy of future work. Creation and preservation require fundamentally different mindsets, often at odds.
Constraints can be creative tools — a signature format or a recognizable voice or point of view. But these constraints should emerge from your authentic interests, not from a desire to safeguard your audience's comfort.
Success creates a choice: protect what you've built or build what comes next. Part of creative growth is accepting that some people who loved your early work will hate what you become, and that's exactly as it should be. Disappoint people.
Your best work emerged from a personal research agenda, not a commercial one. Stop trying to please an audience of strangers and start pleasing different versions of yourself — starting with the version who was curious before there was a reputation to protect, who was obliviously obsessed and freely exploring.
Practice creative archaeology: dig up your native impulses.
Encore anxiety boils down to this: the fear of disappointing people you've already impressed is more paralyzing than the fear of impressing nobody at all.
Success changes the game you're playing without telling you. But your previous success wasn't a formula to replicate; it was an outcome of conditions that no longer exist, namely the condition of not having any audience to please. It’s easy to start managing perception instead of pursuing truth. And yet, half the time, your 'audience anxiety' is just you knowing the work isn't good enough for you.
The antidote isn’t caring less about your work or the people judging it, but caring more about truthseeking — whatever that means to you as the artist. When you're genuinely pursuing truth in your domain, the audience becomes secondary to the investigation. The work itself becomes more interesting than the watchers.
Craft over calibration. Problems over people. Reps over reputation.
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Cover art: Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), David Hockney, 1972.
This is one of the nicest post I have read in recent times. It answers so many of my questions. It’s so easy to get carried away in people pleasing and why it isn’t easy the other way around? Constant conscious fight between the perception and seeking truth exhausts me at times.
"Managing perception instead of pursuing truth" can easily become 99% of corporate work if you are not careful.