Tall poppies & underdogs

Australians suffer from two different, but related phenomena: tall poppy syndrome and underdog worship. These are especially harmful for business owners’ growth and happiness.

This episode pulls apart what happens when Australia’s egalitarian instincts curdle into a culture that punishes ambition, using Pauline Hanson’s “cattle class” jet stunt as the case study in performative humility. We explore why moaners aren’t underdogs, how jealousy is actually useful data, and has joy is the antidote.

You’ll learn:

• Why tall poppy syndrome isn’t just a vibe – it’s something 1 in 3 Australian workers can name happening to them
• Why nearly 70% of ambitious Australians won’t say the word “ambition” out loud – and the one-word swap that I use that gets around this
• The Pauline Hanson jet story, broken down flight by flight — and why “I flew cattle class” might be the most calculated line in Australian politics this year
• What happens when you combine tall poppy syndrome with underdog worship (hint: it’s a marketing weapon, and you’ve definitely fallen for it)
• Why jealousy isn’t a character flaw – and the one question that turns it into your most useful business intel
• The line between sharing a genuine low and performing victimhood for reach — and why most “vulnerable” content on your feed often fails that test
• Our most popular Momentum Mastermind channel – and why it’s full of dogs

If you’ve ever wanted to celebrate a massive milestone in your business before realising that you’ve got nowhere to do so – this one’s for you.

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work. This season is all about failure. So naturally we need to talk about tall poppies and underdogs.

If you’ve ever second-guessed or completely overthought a post about to put onto LinkedIn. If you’ve ever been pleased or proud of yourself about a work achievement—maybe you’ve hit a new revenue goal, you’ve smashed through your personal best—and then you’ve felt really sad about having no one or nowhere to go to share it. If you’ve ever looked at other people on the internet and gotten the distinct impression that they’re performing humility, then this episode is for you.

A definition of terms, dear listener, before we start. Tall poppy syndrome originated as a term in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s, and it’s a byproduct of the cultural value of egalitarianism. So this is a good thing, right? Egalitarianism—yay! But of course it got bastardised, where it’s become a culture in which it’s totally appropriate to cut down high achievers, and this is seen as maintaining fairness.

One in three Australian workers say they’ve experienced tall poppy syndrome at some point, and one in four say it’s a problem in their current workplace. This is a sample size of 12,000 Australians and was a survey done by Seek in July 2025. When it comes to entrepreneurship, the biggest issue is ambition. Seventy-five per cent of Australians say that they are ambitious, but only 6 per cent say ambition is our greatest national asset. Nearly seven in ten Australians don’t talk about their ambitions for fear of being labelled a braggart. This was a survey done by CGU Ambition Index in 2018. That is sad. Sad. Seven in ten don’t talk about their ambitions. How are we supposed to achieve big things if we’re censoring ourselves, even from just sharing it with each other?

Nearly 70 per cent of Australians surveyed believed that fellow Australians regard ambition as a negative trait. I know this to be true in my own business, and it is why I often swap out the word ambition for another word that means the same, but has less negative baggage. The word I use is drive. I have absolutely seen that, sometimes with some people, in business coaching—in one-to-one business coaching specifically—we waste a lot of time. We spend more time than necessary because the coachee is trying to justify to me, the coach they’ve paid, their ambitions and their desires and their drive, rather than just saying, “This is what I want.” We censor ourselves over and over and over again. Women especially.

In a 2023 global survey of 4,710 women across 103 countries, 86.8 per cent said they felt others had undermined their achievements in the workplace. The Tallest Poppy Report is by Medical News Today. This has a very disproportionate impact on women, but it also has enduring problems for everybody. It has a negative impact on entrepreneurship, on risk-taking, on overall economic growth. And this is where it gets interesting: because when we combine tall poppy syndrome with underdogs and championing the underdog, now we have the perfect recipe for performative, manipulative marketing and PR.

I am sure you know what I’m talking about here. Let’s please take a moment to think about all the worst cases of marketing that we see on the internet, where it’s kind of clear and obvious that the person is putting on a performance of humility. They’re doing this because they’re attempting to manipulate us, the audience, because of tall poppy syndrome and the championing of underdogs.

Here’s a recent case in point: Pauline Hansen. Yay! First time she’s appeared on the pod. She brands herself as the everyday Aussie battler being silenced by the elite. Reminds me of somebody else I know: the team man. She’s been given planes and cash by mining billionaire Gina Reinhart. She sat in the Senate for decades—she is a career politician, make no mistake—from age 40, she’s currently 72. She is a career politician. She does not turn up to her cushy job in the Senate. She’s currently polling as the preferred PM. That’s not an underdog. That is a very well-resourced incumbent playing dress-ups.

In April, she was gifted a private jet and $2 million by Gina Reinhart to assist in One Nation’s campaigning, and two employees of companies in Reinhart’s empire donated half a million each to One Nation. And then she was caught flying the plane—the private jet—on at least one occasion with 10 One Nation donors who’d paid 15K each. And she hadn’t disclosed these flights, and didn’t disclose these flights, violating Senate rules until she was contacted by the Guardian newspaper.

So she’s doing an excellent stand-up routine of playing the underdog at the national press club recently. When she gave her address in June 2026, she specifically said, “I just want to clarify that no, Gina’s jet is not broken and I flew cattle class.” So she knew exactly what she was doing. Let me remind you, this happened in June. She was gifted the jet in April. She’d been in trouble like—bloody hell—the audacity of some folks.

She’s not a fringe outsider. She’s now trying to get her daughter into an established political career. Her whole anti-establishment positioning is built on misinformation. And this is the danger of tall poppy syndrome when combined with the underdog: the misinformation that happens, the manipulation, and the self-censorship that results.

This happens all the time in marketing, and it’s a dangerous combination because it pulls us out of our authenticity and joy and into hypervigilance, self-censorship and dishonest performative marketing. It looks like the business owner who has had a massive success in her business—a few examples spring to mind that I will not share. Maybe they’ve sold for a massive amount or they’ve had some other flying success and then they’ve downplayed it. They’ve used words like, “I’m not greedy.” And I quote, this is what looks like justifying our ambitions, justifying our desires. We can’t just say, “This is what I want” because somehow or another that’s not socially acceptable. We have to play this goddamn game. We’re reaffirming the acceptable femininity narrative: “My priorities are my children.” And you know, we even have to mention that we have children. It needs to be kind of in every conversation, in every business conversation, in every business conversation where we feel perhaps like we’re being judged.

Don’t get me started on marketing to women. Oh my God, father. I have collected some doozy examples over the years, and it’s complicated. It’s always so goddamn complicated in the way that marketing to men is not.

So to clarify, I’m talking about business coaching—”make more money in your business”—that’s being marketed to women versus “make more money in your business”—that’s being marketed to men in business. Very different—night and day. And oftentimes there’s a lot of game-playing and complication and justifying that’s going on. You know: “If only you could earn more money in your business, then you could spend more time with your family. Then you could pay for private schools for your family. Then you could go on holidays with your family.” Blah, blah, blah.

The other thing that happens, of course, is that our joy has nowhere to go. And this is one of the saddest things. Because we know business is hard. We know entrepreneurship isn’t easy. We know it’s stressful. We know it’s uncertain. We know all of that stuff. We know there’s a lot of shitty bits to it, and we’re really good, thanks to tall poppy syndrome, at emphasising that. And so our joy, our self-satisfaction, our pats on the back have nowhere to go.

This is one of the main reasons why I have the Audacious Mastermind and I have the Momentum Mastermind. The most popular communication in Momentum is the joy channel, where we celebrate wins, and it’s full of puppies, full of dogs, full of food. It’s full of client wins, of course, but there are so many small wins. And every small win is celebrated. Because what is the remedy for this? What is the remedy for tall poppies and underdogs? We need to model self-satisfaction. We need to model what it looks like to be pleased and proud of yourself. And why wouldn’t you be? You put this goddamn effort in. You probably worked more weekends than you care to admit to. Why wouldn’t we want to celebrate ourselves?

We need to recognise self-centred behaviour for what it is. It is introduced by your socialisation. Babies do not censor themselves. Toddlers hilariously do not censor themselves. So what is the remedy to this? What can we do?

We celebrate ourselves. We celebrate our joys. All the little wins. We stop going, “Oh, well, people are going to think I’m a braggart.” We get out of communities of business communities that are supposed to be pro-business where instead it’s full of passive-aggressiveness, where everybody wants to kind of keep everybody at the same level. God forbid you are pleased and proud of yourself because you’ve just landed a major job.

We need to start celebrating other business owners. Yeah, it’s not just about ourselves and our own joys and our own wins. It’s about other people too. We need to stop with the jealousy. We need to stop. Oh my God. I wasted so many years. I wasted so many years watching other people through the internet, other business owners through the internet and being jealous.

Jealousy does have a purpose. I’m pleased to say the purpose of jealousy is that it spotlights your own desires. It is really useful for helping you spotlight: “Okay, I’m not jealous of that person. Maybe I just like the idea of the thing, but I don’t actually really want the thing that they have that they’re celebrating.” Or maybe, “Oh my God, I’m so jealous of that person. Okay, great. Good insight. What exactly is it that they’re doing that you want?” It’s not about them. It’s about you. It’s about your desires.

And I think a lot of this jealousy comes from this narrative that everything is difficult, there’s a limited amount of resources, a limited amount of money, a limited amount of business. When we can approach competition and collaboration together, then we can change everything. We are competitors, yes, but we are also collaborators, and your competitors—your direct competitors—could be your most profitable referral partners if you would change your attitude towards that.

Finally, I want to differentiate a few things. The first thing is: moaners and complainers are not underdogs. Moaners and complainers are not underdogs. They are victims, and they are energy vampires—they can be energy vampires if we let them be. Definitely the squeaky wheel gets the most oil, and we see this in marketing all the time. We see this in performative marketing, and you better believe that I have been sorely tempted—sorely tempted over the years—to perform that thing. Yeah, ’cause I can see that it works. I can see that it works. People, you know, it is a very admirable human trait to have compassion for somebody who’s struggling. It is a great thing. This is a beautiful thing. It is not a beautiful thing when it is being used and abused to manipulate your audience.

So “woe is me” attracts attention. Negativity on social media—all the social media algorithms are designed—it’s oftentimes when I’ve gone off half-cocked and I’ve had a real rant on social media that I’ve got massive reach. It hasn’t been necessarily engineered that way, but you know, it’s a genuine rant because I’m genuinely angry or frustrated, and I’ve gotten a massive reach.

So what I’d love you to do—what I know, a few different things that I’d love you to take away from this episode—is: can we share both sides? Can we share the highs and the lows, the negatives and the positives? Because that is life. That is life. That is communication. When we can communicate the negatives and the positives, now we’re talking about advanced-level communication because being chipper and chirpy and “everything’s fabulous and it’s all going to work out and be wonderful” well, you’ll lose your credibility very quickly. But if you’re constantly moaning and complaining and “woe is me” and let me rant and rave, you also lose your credibility. We need both because that is life. We need to share the highs and the lows.

I don’t aspire to be the underdog. I hate feeling like the underdog. I hate feeling like the victim. Maybe it’s that kind of hyper-independence—oldest daughter thing—but I don’t want to champion the underdog necessarily. I don’t want to be a victim. I want to be, you know, capable, strong, and get on over an arrogant. Please celebrate your wins. Remove yourself from the company of those passive-aggressive, small people who love to cut down the tall poppies and champion the underdogs, champion the bitches and the moaners and the complainers. Get amongst the people who celebrate you. Be one of those people. Be the person that gives compliments readily and freely. Write the goddamn Google reviews. Write the LinkedIn recommendations. Tell people they’re fabulous and wonderful. Tell them they smell good. Their hair looks great. They’re very interesting. Celebrate the milestones, not just publicly but internally as well.

This is the remedy to tall poppies and underdogs. What do you think? Tell me. You don’t have to agree with me. I love a debate. Love a debate. Send me a message. Write me a review. You can find me in all the places. Let’s talk about it. I want to talk about it. This is how things change. We give language to shared frustrations. We start talking about them, and then change happens.

Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I want to live in a world where joy is thrown around like confetti because it is contagious and your win is my win.

Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or is having you change the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me, and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.