Chapter 1:
The NPC EPIDEMIC
You were not hired to be a background character. You were not born to sit under white fluorescent lights, watching your soul get sucked out of your body in the reflection of the smallest monitor your company was willing to buy for you. You aren’t supposed to be some decomposing ghoul that blindly follows an unclear strategy, forwarding emails and being a more professionally dressed version of all your childhood insecurities and traumas.
And yet, this still happens to highly skilled experts all the time. Not because they are lazy. Not because they lack ambition. Because somewhere along the way, they stopped choosing.
People enter the workplace with opinions, imagination, questions, energy and a Live, Laugh, Love notebook. Ready to take on the world, and to be surprised by a system that is trained to make them wait.
And slowly, waiting becomes a personality. And that personality has a name: NPC.
No, not a Non-Profit Company. A Non-Player Character.
In games (when I refer to games, I mean PC games, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, not board games), NPCs fill the world. They repeat the same coded lines, point towards quests and stare blankly while the main character runs past with great armour, an epic sword and unresolved issues. They are present, but they don’t drive the story.
The working world is full of people who have accidentally become NPCs in their own careers. They show up, comply, respond, attend, observe and complain while waiting publicly.
Corporate NPCs are busy. Very busy. Like, almost never available, busy. But busyness is not agency. Activity isn’t movement. They are on a treadmill, but they are still not going anywhere.
Movement changes something. It creates clarity, solves problems, shifts people and moves decisions forward. It can help others do better work or make the story better because you were there.
Test this. If you were removed from the scene, would anything meaningful change?
Nobody becomes an NPC overnight. It happens through a thousand tiny cuts. Honesty for harmony. Curiosity for compliance. Courage for likeability. A point of view to have access to a seat at the table. And then they sit at the table, and they don’t say anything.
At first, it feels strategic. “I am learning the culture.” “I don’t want to overstep.” “I will speak up when I have more experience.” And yes, some of that might be wisdom. One of the greatest abilities you can have is to read the room. You shouldn’t enter your first day at work speaking as if you are some sort of transformation god that is going to rescue the business. That is not main character energy. That is villainous behaviour.
At some point, “I am learning the room” becomes “I am hiding in the room.” “I am patient” becomes “I am avoiding risk.” “I am being professional” becomes “I have muted everything interesting about myself.”
One of the greatest NPC lines is, “It is what it is.” Sometimes acceptance is healthy. You do not have the ability to fix the economy, stop wars or address a client’s procurement process. And you will never have the power to get someone to respond to your questions in an email. They will respond with an emoji. Why are you like this, Karl? That is where you require inner peace. But often, “it is what it is” means surrender.
It means: “I have stopped believing that I can influence this.”
That is how talented people become background characters. The meeting is pointless. The project is drifting. The strategy has holes. But they say nothing. Then afterwards, on WhatsApp, those who ponder the what-ifs, deliver a flawless analysis of everything that is wrong. Congratulations. You have become a deleted scene.
You have a choice: stay the irrelevant complainer fading into the background, or move forward. But the journey is not easy. I don’t know if you have watched any movies, but the main characters get punched in the face a lot.
Stories often make complicated ideas easier to understand because we get to watch change happen, instead of simply hearing about it. One of the clearest examples of waking up from autopilot comes from a surprisingly funny action-comedy called ‘Free Guy.’
Main Character Analysis: Guy
‘Free Guy’ is a movie about what happens when an NPC in a video game suddenly gains self-awareness and decides he is done being background noise. The main character, Guy, a cheerful bank teller, lives in a chaotic open-world game. Every day, he gets robbed, waves politely, buys coffee and repeats the cycle until something glitches in his programming and he starts thinking for himself.
Guy begins as the ultimate NPC, then something changes. He notices.
That is where transformation begins. Not with power. Not with status. With awareness.
Guy starts seeing the patterns. He realises the system is not reality; it is designed. Your first job is not to escape the loop. Your first job is to see it clearly enough to stop calling it normal.
Every workplace has loops: the Monday meeting where urgency is performed but nothing moves; the leadership discussion where nobody says the real issue because the real issue is in the room; the project that keeps failing because everyone is too polite to name the pattern.
Most people adapt to the loop. Main characters notice the loop, then make choices inside it.
Guy does not become the main character because the system appoints him. He becomes the main character because he wakes up.
NPC Behaviour to Avoid
Saying “it is what it is” when what it actually is ... is your slow professional extinction.
Also avoid: keeping your head down while your ideas die of neglect; waiting for the right time for three years; saying “someone should do something” while being a fully functional someone; staying silent in the meeting and revealing your wrath at a later stage.
Tales of my Adventure
On my own adventure, I was lucky enough to marry a woman called Anika.
Anika started her career as a makeup artist in the film industry, and honestly, she had one of those careers that sounds very cool at parties.
She worked on movies like ‘Chappie’ and ‘The Avengers.’ The kind of projects that make people immediately go, “Wait, seriously?” The kind of work that looks glamorous from the outside because people see the movie title, not the 4 am call times, the pressure, the exhaustion and the quiet grind behind the scenes.
Eventually, she had an opportunity to join the crew of a TV show.
At first, it looked like another step in an exciting career. But over time, I watched something painful happen. I watched her go from main character to NPC.
Not because she lacked talent. Not because she lacked a work ethic. Not because she suddenly stopped caring.
Because the work had become survival. Show up. Do what is required. Get through the day. Get paid. Repeat.
That is one of the dangers of the NPC loop. It does not always look like failure from the outside. Sometimes it looks like a job. Sometimes it looks like stability. Sometimes it even looks like a career that other people think is impressive.
But inside, you know when the story has started draining out of your life.
One evening, Anika came home depressed and crying.
There was no grand speech. No carefully prepared life plan. No strategic career transition document. Just a person I loved sitting in front of me, completely depleted by a story that no longer fit her. So, I said, “Quit.”
Not the most sophisticated intervention, I’ll admit. More emotional grenade than executive coaching. But sometimes the truth does not arrive in the way we expect it.
I told her, “Just leave and join us. I don’t know what you are going to do yet, but this is not working.” So, she left.
And she joined our creative team with almost no obvious role and, at that stage, no clear ability in the work we were doing. At first, she made coffee. Then, every now and again, she helped with makeup when we had a live stream in our studio. Then she started noticing things.
She noticed gaps in the process, the content, how we served customers and what the business needed, but nobody had clearly named them yet.
And instead of waiting for someone to give her the perfect job description, she moved.
Over the next five years, I watched her go from making coffee to becoming Head of Content.
That is not a small shift. That is not a cute internal promotion story. That is a character arc. She did not become the main character because I handed her a crown, a title or a perfectly designed opportunity. She had to work hard and dig deep. She became the main character because she chose movement.
She saw gaps and filled them; took responsibility before she was officially ready; built trust with customers; became useful in a way the business could feel and stopped waiting for the plot.
You can have a career that looks impressive from the outside and still feel like an NPC inside it.
You can also start with no clear role, no obvious authority and no polished plan and still become a main character through agency, value, trust and movement. The difference is not always talent.
Sometimes the difference is the choice to stop surviving the scene and start changing it.
Character Build Exercise: Spot the Loop
Choose one recurring work situation where you feel passive, invisible or stuck.
Write down:
● What keeps happening?
● What line do you keep repeating to yourself about it?
● What useful action have you avoided taking?
● What would change if you acted as this scene needed you?
Now choose one move you can make this week: ask a question, clarify ownership, propose a next step or name the pattern.
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