You Feel It Too, Don’t You?
The slow fade from fire to just…fine.
One week you’re the person pushing for better solutions. You ask the questions that matter. You see what could be improved and you say something.
The next week? You’re still doing the work. But that voice inside – the one that used to whisper “what if we tried this instead?” – has gone quiet.
The Truth About Silent Resignation
Here’s what most people don’t understand about quiet quitting. It’s not laziness disguised as boundary-setting. It’s not entitlement dressed up as self-care.
It starts with excellence.
You give 101%. You anticipate problems. You solve things before they become fires. You care so much it keeps you up at night, running through tomorrow’s challenges in your head.
Then something shifts.
Your extra effort disappears into the void. No recognition. No “I noticed you stayed late to fix that.” No acknowledgment that the reason everything runs smoothly is because you’re holding it together behind the scenes.
In support roles, this hits differently. Your work is the scaffolding that keeps everything standing. When you do it well, it becomes invisible. People assume the stability is automatic – not the result of someone choosing to care when they could easily choose not to.
The Dangerous Comfort of Mediocrity
At first, pulling back feels efficient. Revolutionary, even.
You focus on what’s explicitly asked. You stop volunteering ideas. You do exactly what’s in your job description and nothing more. For the first time in months, you leave work at work.
You tell yourself it’s healthy. Boundaries. Work-life balance. All those buzzwords that sound so reasonable.
But here’s the trap: if you’re built for excellence, mediocrity isn’t neutral – it’s corrosive.
Every time you bite your tongue instead of suggesting a better process, something inside you dims. Every time you let a problem slide that you could have solved, you train yourself not to see problems at all.
And in roles like executive assistance, that instinct to see what others miss? That’s not just a skill. It’s the difference between support and true partnership.
Why Smart People Stay Silent
The math seems simple. Time is finite. Energy is finite. Every hour spent going above and beyond is an hour taken from something else.
From clearing your backlog. From the tasks that actually get measured. From your life outside work.
When you’re drowning in the essential, why would you take on the exceptional?
But there’s a hidden cost to this calculation. Research shows that quiet quitters make up 50-62% of workforces globally. The individual decision to dial back becomes a collective erosion of the very thing that makes organizations thrive: people who care enough to go beyond the minimum.gallup
The Executive Assistant Paradox
In our world, the paradox is particularly cruel.
Your best work is invisible work. You prevent crises that no one knows were coming. You smooth interactions that would otherwise create friction. You anticipate needs before they’re expressed.
When you excel, you disappear. The better you are, the more automatic everything seems.
But visibility isn’t just about recognition – though that matters. It’s about maintaining the part of yourself that sees opportunities for impact. When you’re invisible for too long, you start to believe your contributions don’t matter.
The Real Danger
The danger isn’t missing a deadline. It isn’t disappointing your manager.
The danger is becoming someone who no longer asks the hard questions.
Someone who no longer cares enough to push for better. Someone who’s learned to be satisfied with “good enough” because “excellent” goes unnoticed anyway.
And here’s what research confirms: disengaged employees don’t just affect their own performance – they drag entire teams down with them. The cost of quiet quitting can be as high as 4% of an organization’s entire wage bill.
A Different Way Forward
Maybe the system isn’t designed to work this way. Maybe the invisibility of support roles is an unintentional blind spot, not a deliberate dismissal.
But even if that’s true – even if the lack of recognition is structural rather than personal – you still have a choice.
You can decide not to let the silence change who you are.
You can keep asking the hard questions, even if no one’s asking you to. You can keep caring, even when it would be easier not to. You can hold onto the spark that makes the work feel alive, even when that spark isn’t being fed by external validation.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: the moment you stop protecting what makes you excellent is the moment you stop being the person who deserved recognition in the first place.
The Choice is Yours
Some people will read this and think it’s about accepting exploitation. It’s not.
It’s about recognizing that your professional identity – the part of you that sees solutions and asks better questions – is yours to protect. The world doesn’t owe you recognition for caring. But you owe yourself the choice to keep caring anyway.
The spark that makes your work matter? That’s not dependent on who notices.
And if you hold onto it – if you refuse to let the silence turn you into someone smaller – there’s always the chance that someone else will see it and remember their own.
The question isn’t whether you’ll be recognized for going above and beyond.
The question is: who do you become when nobody’s watching?
