Surprising people isn’t petty. It’s just what happens when you don’t narrate your progress.

Announcing what you are about to do spends the feeling of doing it in advance, and it invites opinions before the thing is sturdy enough to survive them. Work quietly for a while and people meet a version of you they did not watch get built. Their surprise is a side effect, not a trick you played.

Take something you are working on and go a month without updates. Tell one person who is actually useful to you and let everybody else find out when there is something to see. Notice whether the work gets easier once you stop performing the middle of it.