Posts

LinkedIn added a button so you can report a post as "AI slop."

Good luck with that.

Because nobody will flag slop, not really. They'll flag polish. Tidy line breaks, a clean structure, em dashes, a sentence that doesn't stumble. Which means the people who got good at writing will get reported, and the people who rough it up on purpose won't.

Not to mention those who'll press it on purpose. Nothing personal, just a competitor having a bad week and a button that costs nothing to tap.

I use AI every day but the words are mine because the life behind them is mine. A report button can't see that. It can only see the surface.

Anyway. It's Friday. If this post gets flagged, at least I'll know somebody read it.

The secret to growing your presence online?

Surround yourself with people laying bricks, sharing tools, and building something of their own. In all honesty, I'm starting to learn this lesson myself.

Builders build better together.

If your goal is to grow online, I want to connect with you. Send me a DM.

I wasn't going to post anything today.

In fact, I had absolutely nothing to say.

But then I just didn’t want to ruin my perfect 14-day posting streak.

Does this count as a real post? Or am I gaming the system?

"Why would I take advice from someone who hasn't made it yet?"

Fair. You shouldn't. Not if what you want is advice.

The whole guru economy runs on one promise: I climbed the mountain, here's the view, pay me and I'll describe it to you. And people love it, because a finished expert feels safe.

Someone who's already done the scary part so you don't have to feel scared alone.

Except the map they're selling you was drawn from the summit. From memory. Years after they crossed the bit you're standing on right now, when the trail looked completely different and the weather was kinder and the path they took don't even exist anymore.

You're not buying a map. You're buying a postcard.

A support group is not that. There's no stage. There's no guru pretending the fog cleared for them and it'll clear for you if you just believe hard enough.

It's a small room of people mid-race. Building on LinkedIn and X, right now, in public, with the same drafts that don't land and the same weeks where nothing moves.

Which means it's a genuinely bad fit for some people. If you want a finished expert to follow, someone with the numbers and the merch and the confident smile, go find one. They're everywhere. They'll take your money and describe the view.

But if you'd rather have someone drawing the map next to you, close enough to notice when you go quiet, then a support group is the right place for you.

I'm building that support group. Founding chairs are free. Entry's by DM.

If you quit the hustle, who's writing your rules now?

I ask because the anti-hustle crowd looks a lot like the hustle crowd in a dressing gown. Same volume, same certainty, same need to tell you exactly how to live. They swapped the pre-dawn cold plunge for a smug lie-in and decided that was enlightenment.

The arc is always the same. Delete the productivity apps, unfollow the 4am guys, write the manifesto about rest being resistance. Then, over the next year or so, become the most rigid person in the room. No posting on weekends. No "hustle language". No selling, because selling is icky now. No ambition you're allowed to say out loud.

That's not freedom. That's taking the hustle crowd's rules and flipping each one upside down. Which answers the question, really. If you define yourself by what you're against, the thing you're against still writes your rules. The productivity guy is still running your life.

I can say this from an odd position, because I've never belonged to either church.

I started working at age fifteen. I've welcomed Mondays my whole life, and people who only seem to exist for the weekends have always puzzled me a bit. By most definitions that puts me squarely in the hustle category, but I've never once called it that.

Nobody's routine, and nobody's rejection of a routine, will ever run my life.

Which is the one thing neither side can give you, because both are selling the same product: one correct way to work, performed loudly for strangers. Hustle shouldn't be idealised, but neither should its opposite. The moment either one becomes your identity, you're preaching an ideology, and someone else is holding the script.

The real choice was never to hustle or not to hustle. It's ignoring the options and working out what actually brings meaning to your one life. For me that happens to be hard work. For you it might be something else entirely, and that's the whole point.

The balanced view of reality is slower, quieter and earns you no applause at all.

Probably why so few people talk about it.

You keep buying the map because you think you're lost.

You're not lost. You know exactly what to do. Post consistently. Talk to people. Show up when you'd rather not. You've read it forty times. You could recite it in your sleep.

So you buy another course. Save another post. Bookmark another "ultimate guide to LinkedIn growth in 2026" like the last twelve didn't turn to dust in a folder you never open.

And you stall at the exact same spot you always stall. Three weeks in. Every time.

Here's the thing you got wrong about that stall, though. You think the problem is a knowledge gap, a missing tactic, or one more piece of information that'll finally make it click.

It's don't have a knowledge problem. You have an audience problem.

Nobody is watching, so you do the work, the good work, the hard invisible work, and it lands in a silence so complete you start to wonder if you're mad. No one in your life gets it. To them it's a strange hobby you do on your laptop while dinner goes cold. They don't clock the effort. They can't. They don't know what a decent post costs you on a bad day.

So the effort goes unwitnessed. And unwitnessed effort dies. Quietly, with your full cooperation, the way I've watched it die in myself for years of building alone.

That's why I'm building a support group. Not another roadmap, but a small room of people running the same race, close enough to notice when you go quiet.

A group where your small numbers aren't embarrassing because everyone's early at something. Where a missed week is data, not a verdict. Where the person who watches your progress knows precisely what it cost, because they're paying the same price this week.

That's the thing information could never buy you. Someone who sees you.

If you're building in public and sick of doing it into the void, DM me.

You prepare for the client call like it’s THE call.

You rehearse the pitch and clean up the deck. You practise the confident version of your answer to the question you know they’ll ask. All of it aimed at projecting your best self.

But that call isn’t where your client decided who you are.

That decision already happened. Quietly. In a tab you never saw them open.

Because the first time any serious prospect learns about you, you’re not there. They hear your name, type it into a search bar, and read whatever comes back before they’ve shaken your hand or heard a single word out of your mouth. By the time you’re in the actual conversation, they’ve already formed an impression.

And what did they find?

A headline you wrote three jobs ago. A profile photo where you look like a stranger to yourself. A featured section that’s empty or whatever you posted in 2023. A trail of old ventures you’ve long outgrown, sitting there like costumes you forgot to take off.

I know the costume problem intimately. I called myself a brand designer for much longer than I should have. Not because it paid, but because I knew my skills were lagging behind my taste, and I kept thinking one more project would close the gap. It never quite did. Then it took me years after I stopped doing the work to tell myself, out loud, that I wasn’t a brand designer anymore. The label outlived the job. That’s how these things go.

You’ve spent months getting genuinely good at the work. Meanwhile, the version of you that greets every prospect first is a shell you stopped inhabiting years ago.

So you walk in, sharp and ready, and you can feel the call is slightly cooler than it should be. You can’t put your finger on why. It’s because the first call already went badly. You just didn’t know it was happening.

Fixing this doesn’t mean creating a fake version of yourself. Do everything you can to improve that first impression, yes. But it can never cost you the truth. No lying, no deceiving, no dressing up as someone you’re not. The whole point is the best possible presentation of your real self.

When someone searches my name, all I’m aiming for is that they perceive me as a person with depth, values, and the competence to back them up. Not much else. I won’t stack it with anything that “converts” but isn’t me, because that’s just lying at scale.

You cannot rehearse for a conversation you’re not invited to. You can only make sure the person who shows up in your place is actually you.

You prepare for the client call like it’s THE call. And you should, but the real call happens before you’re ever invited into the room.