Don’t look at this house (seriously, don’t)
A story, quote, and lesson about how attention really works
You looked didn’t you?
Sometimes the best way to draw attention to something is by trying to hide it.
In 2003, a photographer named Kenneth Adelman was documenting coastal erosion along the California shoreline.
As part of his work, he uploaded 12,000 aerial photos of the coast to a public website. One of those photos, file 3850, happened to show the sprawling Malibu mansion of singer and actress Barbra Streisand.
Nobody cared. The photo had only been downloaded six times, two of those by her own legal team.
That is, until Streisand filed a $50 million lawsuit to have the image taken down.
The result? Massive publicity. News outlets picked up the story. The photo quickly went viral. Suddenly, everyone wanted to see the house she was trying to hide.
More than 400,000 people downloaded the image in the following month.
The legal action meant to protect her privacy had the exact opposite effect.
It was such a dramatic backfire that it sparked a new term: The Streisand Effect - when an attempt to suppress information ends up amplifying it instead.
Streisand wasn’t alone in this. Just recently, a tech CEO named Andy Byron became the internet’s latest cautionary tale. At a Coldplay concert in Boston, cameras briefly focused on him hugging a woman and enjoying the concert. Instead of smiling and waving like most couples would, they panicked. He pulled away. She turned her face. Moments later, they stormed off.
That brief clip lit up social media. Users speculated wildly, and with some quick digging, they discovered that the woman wasn’t his wife. She was his Chief People Officer, Kristin Cabot.
They were just caught having an affair in public.
And while I’m not condoning their actions, the reality is they brought this upon themselves. Had they simply stayed still, the moment likely would’ve been forgotten by the end of the next song.
Instead, it exploded into a public scandal.
“Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
- Chris Martin, Coldplay’s lead singer after witnessing the moment live during the concert.
There’s a strange truth buried in all of this: trying too hard to hide something often ends up highlighting it. The energy we spend covering something up can make people wonder why it’s worth hiding in the first place.
This applies far beyond lawsuits and viral videos.
We see it in relationships, in politics, at work, and even in our personal lives. Whether it’s denying a mistake, overcorrecting a tiny flaw, or acting like something never happened, our efforts to erase usually shine a spotlight instead.
Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to own it. Acknowledge it. Let it pass.
Because silence, subtlety, or even just moving on will often attract far less attention than a full-blown cover-up.
So now I ask you:
Where in your life are you trying so hard to hide something, that you may actually be making it louder?
Wow. Excellent reflection and comparison from the Barb Streisand Effect and the Cold Play Kiss Cam. Loved it.
Wow. This is an excellent issue to make our internal analysis of what we are doing. It is a TOUGH exercise, since it is human nature to try to hide some things, without realizing you are actually doing the opposite. What I am thinking is how to make it a conscious effort of detecting it. It is really hard. But my father used to say that if you have a slight inclination to hide something it means it is not good. He would also say, right or wrong is strict, if there are doubts about something being right, immediate conclusion is that it is wrong. Thanks for sharing this important challenge for internal analysis.