There is a well-documented phenomenon called the spotlight effect, and the finding is simply that we badly overestimate how much other people notice us. The research tends to involve embarrassing t-shirts and the discovery that roughly half as many people registered them as the wearer assumed. What matters is that the same error governs how we think about our professional mistakes and at much higher stakes.

Consider how asymmetrically memory works here. I can recall, in some detail, a question I fumbled in a talk years ago: the pause, the inadequate answer, the particular quality of the silence. I would guess that not one person in that room remembers it, and I am confident about this because I cannot remember a single comparable moment from anyone else's talk, and I have attended a great many. We are each the centre of our own view and a minor background figure in everyone else's, and we persistently fail to apply the second half of that.

What follows is quite freeing once it lands. The awkward question you want to ask will not be remembered. The visible uncertainty when you admit you do not know something will be forgotten by lunchtime, if it registers at all. The new thing you would try if you were not worried about looking foolish has a much smaller audience than you imagine. This is not an argument for carelessness; real failures do get noticed and should. It is an argument against letting an imagined audience veto things that are worth doing. So, as a reflection for today: what would you try if you genuinely accepted that nobody will remember how it went?