The LinkedIn trap
Assets, empires and a few thoughts about playing the game on the world's professional social network.
There’s a great scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind where John Forbes Nash, played by Russell Crowe, is brought to the door of a restaurant where a round table of old academic dignitaries are having lunch.
One of the party is being presented with an award in service of his many decades of research, and Nash’s companion asks him, “What do you see?”
—Recognition, Nash responds without hesitation.
—No! Accomplishment! says his companion.
In 2024, the battle between recognition and accomplishment is fought every day on LinkedIn, the one social network where a real name and a real photo are essential, a rule which has, in a weird way, made it the weirdest of all social networks.
As someone on X, or old Twitter, wrote recently:
“X is full of real people behind fake names.
LinkedIn is full of fake people behind real names.”
Years ago, when the social networks were taking root, a clear delineation emerged between the sign-up approach.
On places such as Reddit and, later, Discord, anonymity was an unspoken rule. Nobody on Reddit or Discord uses their real name.
Twitter became a crazy crossover. Want to show up as your real life self? Perfect. Prefer to be anonymous? Go for it.
LinkedIn and Facebook were the two networks that forced real names, but even then, two distinct forks emerged.
Through a process of rapid digital behavior evolution, Facebook became ring-fenced for extended family and crackpots (and, often, the members of your extended family who showed themselves to be crackpots).
The LinkedIn fork was different. It was (another unwritten rule) a family-free zone. What started out as an online resumé/CV, LinkedIn morphed into the presented version of the self: the you you wanted to be seen by that tiny fraction of people who make the decisions and write the cheques.
In job interviews, the one thing you can never show yourself to be is yourself.
The job interview — all five rounds of it, with everyone from the culture officer to the CEO to the cleaner, plus eight hours of suitability assessments and test assignments — demands that you strip away all the parts of you that are not relevant to the task at hand.
The task at hand? Showing you can create value on the bottom line by solving a stated problem.
If deal-making is part of the deal, your golf game could be valuable, but if your job is going to be sitting in an office and crunching numbers, talk about tee-times at your peril. Love of poetry? Forget about it. You live for travel? FOR GOD’S SAKE SHUT UP.
LinkedIn is, in many ways, one never-ending job interview.
Why are you there? Why is anyone?
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