It’s the beginning of August, and I’ve prolonged putting my ideas into writing as much as I possibly could as my manager side-eyes me, silently questioning my reluctance to emerge onto the personal newsletter scene. I could probably bunker down and hold out for a few more months but, alas, here I am, starting to share. The direction of this writing is unknown, but it is mine, and there is something comforting about that.
To the daring few that choose to read on, welcome to my inner monologue.
I’ve coined a new phrase: “thought-haver.” I definitely didn’t coin that, but I‘ve been saying it for the past month or so. If you’ve been on LinkedIn before, I’m sure you’ve already guessed that this is a play on “thought leader.” I’ve always been curious as to who decides when one morphs into a “thought leader.” Is there a Michelin group handing out brains, or perhaps a collective stream of consciousness that votes quarterly on the world’s top thinkers? Either way, it’s all arbitrary. As people pursue the quest for thought leadership, I have been obsessed with in-person human connection.
With all the noise around us, I believe there is value in silence. “Silence” in this context does not mean that one should not have thoughts and opinions and convictions. Silence is taking conversations offline and seeing how they play out when there is another person who can interject on the other side. There is the possibility for interruption, and you are forced to listen and take a moment before you reply.
Most thought leaders are self-appointed, and that’s not something I’m quite comfortable doing. There is so much shared online nowadays, and the earnestness I witness seems to have the opposite effect on me. When someone posts that their family member has passed away on LinkedIn, do I give a condolences thumbs up? I know some people find it cathartic to post these kinds of things, but I struggle to reconcile tech and innovation with my idea of authentic communication.
We’re in the early years of AI, and it excites me more than it scares me (my job paid me to type that - KIDDING). It really does excite me. To know that humans have the potential to be exponentially more productive, and to create without a technical barrier, is one of the coolest things ever. Something not as cool is a growing culture around AI: the cult of scalability. Scale. Scale. Scale. Scale the business, scale the human, scale everything! I’m learning about the importance of scaling certain processes, but from the perspective of human connection, I couldn’t care less about scale.
Authenticity is difficult to scale, and I don’t believe it should. I’ve wrestled with this one for a while. Connecting with people makes me incredibly happy, so why shouldn’t I do it through an online medium where I can, theoretically, connect with way more? And yet I can’t for the life of me click “post.” I have historically opted for the quality over quantity route. My most authentic, most genuine and, at times, unbearably uncomfortable, connections have formed and strengthened in person. So what should I scale and what should I leave to slowly increase, decline, or even plateau?
I instinctually want to opt for a slow roll on human connectivity: The raw and ugly side of being human that we don’t tend to show online, that takes a bit to pull out of us. These are the parts of humanity that tech has yet to perfect. As a self-proclaimed thought-haver, this writing is allowing me to explore how someone (not a leader, just a thinker) can have something to say, and communicate it in a way that feels personal. At the end of the day, it’s still me, a person, writing what comes to my head (until Ex-Machina me takes over).
