(If you're not provoking a reaction from the status quo, you're probably not doing anything that truly matters.)

The first sign that your work matters is not applause. It’s resistance. It arrives as raised eyebrows in safe rooms, as polite delays masked as “process,” as emails asking for “one more revision,” as a sudden chorus of whataboutism from people who have never built anything and don’t intend to start now. Good work has good enemies because good work rearranges power. It threatens someone’s comfort, someone’s budget, someone’s narrative about how the world is and must remain. The status quo’s instinct is self-preservation. Your best signal that you’re on the right track is when that instinct wakes up and snarls.

We are taught that significant ideas achieve consensus, but this is untrue. Instead, they initially create divisions. Consensus only develops much later, once the foundation is complete, the work is finished, and the public acknowledges the achievement.

At the beginning, the work is a rumor with a pulse. It looks implausible. It makes audiences squint. The reaction is rarely “brilliant.” It is “hmm.” In that “hmm” is a border guard checking your passport at the frontier of the possible. No stamp, no passage. The job is to keep walking until the guard runs out of objections.

Enemies rarely appear overtly malicious; instead, they often adopt the guise of gentle compromise. Your calendar, for example, becomes an obstacle when it fills with meetings that prioritize urgent documentation over actual work. Similarly, a spreadsheet turns hostile when it dictates that only projects with predictable, guaranteed outcomes are worth pursuing. Even a brand playbook can become an adversary when it forbids creative choices, such as declaring an interesting color "illegal." These are respectable opponents, suited, corporate, and well-behaved. They will never openly confront you; instead, they will overwhelm you with seemingly good intentions.

Other enemies are louder: envy disguised as critique, purity tests that demand perfect solutions before first drafts, drive-by cynicism from people whose imagination retired years ago. They will tell you that your work is naive, derivative, unrealistic. Some of them will be right. The presence of enemies doesn’t prove you’re right; it only proves you’ve started. Doing work that matters requires a second skill beyond courage: discrimination. You must learn which enemies to ignore and which to study.

Here’s a useful test. Imagine three lanes on the road ahead.

In the first lane are the gatekeepers. They preserve the existing order. Their fear is loss of control. Their feedback is always “not yet,” “not here,” or “not this.” They prefer inevitability, not novelty. Their resistance is a map of where the current is strongest. Note it, but do not let it steer.

In the second lane are the practitioners. They understand the terrain because they’ve bled on it. Their critiques often sound harsh but carry specifics: a regulation you missed, a failure mode you haven’t modeled, a story that won’t travel. When they say, “This part will break,” it’s not sabotage; it’s a warning flare. These are not enemies. They’re reluctant allies whose honesty can save you.

In the third lane are the audience members you serve. They don’t write memos. They write behavior. They vote with time, trust, and money. When they resist, it’s often because we asked them to leap without building a bridge. Their hesitation is an instruction manual. Read it.

Resistance to the existing state of affairs is not a matter of morality; it is a fundamental principle, akin to physics.  Systems accumulate habits. Habits harden into norms. Norms become invisible. Your work says, “Let’s make the invisible visible.” That revelation rarely reads as convenient. A factory that pollutes a river has a supply chain optimized around denial. A school that rewards memorization has pedagogy optimized around compliance. A newsroom in love with outrage has metrics optimized around addiction. Your change threatens the compounds everyone built on top of yesterday’s assumption. When you push, they wobble. Wobbling things make noise.

History is blunt about this. Revolutions are messy on day one and tidy on day a thousand. The people who quietly shifted medicine, governance, art, and technology did not wait for permission slips. They took the heat. They learned which heat to endure and which to convert into light. They also learned a humbler lesson: being opposed is not the same as being consequential. Some ideas attract enemies because they’re reckless or cruel. The task is to pursue significance without becoming a colossus that stomps over the very people you claim to serve.

How do you proceed without becoming the kind of zealot who confuses stubbornness for vision?

First, define the harm you intend to reduce and the human you intend to help. Not the persona. The person. Give them a life beyond your pitch deck. What time do they wake? Who do they love? What’s breaking their back? When you carry a real person in your chest, you listen differently. You become less seduced by abstract victory and more committed to practical relief. You make trade-offs that protect dignity. Enemies can still arrive, but your defenses are built on empathy rather than ego.

Second, build a circle that can argue without fracture. A good team is a greenhouse for dissent. It lets hard questions grow without tearing the roof off. Create rituals that invite the strongest objections early: pre-mortems, red-team sessions, “kill-the-idea” drills. Then decide fast. Motion beats perfection because motion generates data. The antidote to institutional stalling is a cadence that makes learning unavoidable.

Third, measure the right thing. A common trap is to aim at vanity metrics that impress your peers but do nothing for your purpose. Awards, retweets, panels, think pieces. They’re confetti. Real measures are stubbornly local and occasionally unglamorous: shorter wait times at the clinic, higher retention in month three, fewer support tickets per feature, more farmers with reliable access to water. When you choose measurements that bite, enemies cannot accuse you of theater.

Fourth, protect your energy like it’s equity. Work that matters invites busywork that doesn’t. Guard the morning or the evening for deep work. Say no to one more “quick sync” that will sprawl into a committee. Build gates around production time and be ruthless with them. If the system insists on ceremony, offer the minimum ritual necessary to pass through, then return to the forge.

Fifth, narrate your intent. Silence is an invitation for others to write your story. Share your why often enough that people can repeat it without you in the room. When opposition mischaracterizes your motives, a clear narrative allows allies to intervene. Storytelling is not spin; it’s scaffolding for shared effort.

Sixth, develop a tolerance for being misunderstood in the short term. The first public reaction is rarely the final verdict. Early drafts leak. Rumors mutate. Competitors whisper. The temptation to defend every misread will bankrupt your focus. Correct what matters. Ignore what doesn’t. Let the work be your rebuttal.

There is also the ethics of resistance to consider. When an institution pushes back, it is sometimes right. Constraints exist for reasons beyond bureaucracy: safety, fairness, stewardship. The impatient builder who bulldozes without listening becomes the villain of a future cautionary tale. The path is not to obey every rule but to interrogate the reasons behind them. If you can meet the reason without obeying the ritual, you’ve found a smarter route. If you cannot meet the reason, you’re not ready.

Jealousy is the pettiest enemy, and it often lives closer than you think. A colleague who resents your momentum may disguise sabotage as concern. A partner may withhold resources to keep you manageable. This is the shadow economy of status inside every organization. Pleading will not achieve its reform.. You counter it with clarity and redundancy: documented decisions, distributed knowledge, multiple paths to critical resources. Make the project resilient to any one person’s approval.

Then there is the enemy of indifference, which is worse than hostility. At least hostile people are awake. Indifference is a sleeping town that swallows your best work without a burp. If you’re ignored, examine your distribution, not your talent. The world’s attention is a lottery you can influence with craft: tight positioning, repeatable messaging, consistent publishing, and relentless follow-up. You are not entitled to an audience. You earn it by being useful and present.

One more truth: good enemies sharpen you. They force you to articulate what you believe, to bulletproof your assumptions, to cut the ornamental from the essential. They give you the gift of focus. Without them, it’s easy to drift into competent mediocrity, where nothing hurts and nothing changes. The opposite of risk is not safety. It’s irrelevance.

So what does it look like when you’re doing it right?

It looks like small bets compounding into undeniable change. It looks like first users who become evangelists because you solved a real pain, not because your brand is cute. It looks like critical memos softening into cautious support. It looks like your team tired in the honest way, not the political way. It looks like a calendar that has blank space to think. It looks like a backlog where the top items are hard and necessary, not easy and decorative.

There will be days you wonder if the fight is worth it. Count the cost, then count the alternative. If you abandon the work, does the old pattern continue to hurt people you say you care about? If the answer is yes, keep going. Persistence is not romance; it’s arithmetic. Add the hours, subtract the noise, multiply the learning, divide the credit. Repeat until the inertia flips.

When the tide finally turns, it will look overnight to everyone who wasn’t paying attention. They will call you visionary or lucky. Accept neither label. You were stubborn about the right thing and flexible about the rest. You listened long enough to upgrade your plan and ignored long enough to keep your nerve. You welcomed good enemies as evidence of movement, and you outlasted them or converted them or rendered them irrelevant.

The world does not improve by default. Entropy is the house edge. Choose work that offends entropy. Choose work that insists tomorrow can be kinder than today, then build the machinery to make that sentence true. You will be resisted. Good. It means you’ve entered the story. Keep writing until there is no room left for the old plot to stand.

You don’t need permission. You need purpose, a circle that tells you the truth, metrics that refuse to flatter, and the courage to be disliked while you earn the right to be trusted. When the enemies arrive, greet them by name. Thank them for the clarity. Hand them a hard hat, or show them the door. Either way, continue.

Good work has good enemies. Be worthy of them. And make sure they have something formidable to oppose: a body of work that bends the room in the direction of better.