I saw this going viral, “Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity“:
I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned into the worst possible version of itself. It’s a place where people post half baked nonsense all for the sake of building a personal brand that nobody really cares about.
I agree that the content on LinkedIn is pretty generic or bland. It makes one wonder how much of the content is actuality intended for human consumption, instead of written by bots for bots. Crypto scammers, like in North Korea, are known for creating fake LinkedIn profiles, and it works so well because a sort of artificial fakeness is part and parcel of the brand.
Yet at the same time, I don’t think there is any solution. Most content is mediocre because most people by statistical certainty must be mediocre. This is like watching people play a pick-up game of hoops and wondering, “Why can’t they play at the NBA level? How mediocre of them.” LinkedIn is extremely popular, with 1.1 billion users worldwide. Thus it’s much more representative of the general population, compared to a platform like Substack, which has 50 million users and only 17,000 writers. People who are really good at writing and have incisive insights, like those writers who make a living on Substack, are way outliers. They are probably in the top 1/2-1% of verbal ability, compared to the median LinkedIn user.
Even people who are reasonably, outwardly smart find it hard to write well or struggle at it. Few would dispute Warren Buffett or Peter Thiel are objectively smart if we go by IQ, yet how much writing have they produced?
Theil’s book, Zero to One, which was compiled from a collection of notes, was ghostwritten. Buffett, despite having multiple generations to do so, has never written a book, and only a single op-ed article, in 2008. (I am excluded his shareholder letters, as those are for a self-selected audience, his shareholders.) If you go down the list of the Forbes 100, save for Bill Gates, few have actual non-ghostwritten books, or writings in general, to their name. These are people who embody competence and results, yet if I had to guess, would still struggle at it and would come off as dull or banal as those LinkedIn posts.
There is a common misconception, particularly by the educated online commentariat, that writing ability is something that should be picked up through osmosis or ‘vibes’, like talking or breathing. I disagree, as discussed in the post “Why writing is harder than STEM, revisited“:
This does not come as a surprise at all to me that students cannot write well. It’s like saying that most people cannot fly a plane well. Those who can are called pilots, which is a profession, yet for some reason pundits have this notion that being a writer or good at writing is something that you just ‘pick up’ through cultural osmosis or is involuntary, like speech or breathing, but this is no more true than picking up the piano and expecting to play at a concert level. A few years of school does not suddenly make someone a competent writer, any more than a few years of music lessons make someone a professional musician.
Moreover, verbal ability, of which writing ability is a subset, is as ‘g-loaded’ as quantitative ability, yet for some reason, people think that writing should be easier than math. If writing is supposed to be easy, why do so many college students–who should presumably already be literate–rely on AI as a crutch? They struggle at organization, idea generation, sentence structure and other aspects of the writing process. Despite years of schooling, they are still not that good at it, as teachers can attest when they grade their papers.
Writing is like math in the sense it requires organization, precision, and structure, compared to speech, which is more spontaneous or vibe-like. Almost anyone can write, but writing well is a skill, which takes practice, time, and has a learning curve, like many other things in life. No one would expect someone to just intuitively fly a plane well. Or a dunk a basketball well. That’s why so many CEOs and other successful people rely heavily on ghostwriters: they recognize that they haven’t yet developed strong writing skills, or are too busy to develop them.