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Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Do you remember back in the day when you were thrilled to welcome a new baby into the world, honoured to serve your country, or blessed to celebrate a milestone birthday surrounded by family and friends? Remember when you were grateful to reconnect with an old friend, humbled by the wisdom of a mentor, or ecstatic to achieve a hard-fought personal goal? Remember when you were truly proud to accomplish something meaningful, moved by an act of kindness, or awestruck by the beauty of a perfect moment?
Ya, me too. These are, after all, poignant examples of milestones worthy of genuine reflection. But it seems these days we’re similarly thrilled, honoured, and blessed to attend webinars, complete on-line training modules, or join a sub-committee—at least according to the hyperbole word salad that is LinkedIn. We live in a world where scale triumphs over substance; where the multiple beats the message, and where being thrilled, honoured and blessed on LinkedIn has become the modern currency of self-worth, valued not for its authenticity but for its ability to amplify noise over nuance. We appear hellbent on devaluing the currency of a commendation in the name of self-congratulatory embellishment.
How did we get here? When did the adjective one-upmanship, like an arms race where the weapons are ridiculous superlatives, creep into our feeds? Recently, I shared this text exchange with one of the most respected and talented marketing minds I know:
Consider me inspired.
Don’t get me wrong—LinkedIn is an important part of our professional lives and a mostly useful business tool. But can we admit we’ve all gotten a bit carried away with the hyperbole? If you’re going to be active on LinkedIn—which, let’s face it, you probably should be—you might as well do it thoughtfully and with purpose, and not just consult a thesaurus or outsource it to ChatGPT. After all, even with its many talents, ChatGPT has likely never been in love, and therefore assigns an absurdly misplaced importance to certain adjectives, over others.
Think of it like wrapping a present or writing a thank you note. A post should stand out for its sincerity and care, crafted with intention, relevance, and authenticity to stand head and shoulders above the endless scroll of hyperbolic self-promotional noise. LinkedIn is like being at a rock concert in a huge stadium where everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs in an effort to be heard. Mightn’t be more compelling to lower your voice and let your authentic self speak for itself? In a sea of noise, the quiet, sincere notes often resonate the loudest—like the fan holding up a heartfelt sign or singing along softly, who the performer actually notices amidst the chaos. Maybe it’s better to focus on adding genuine value, offering thoughtful insights, or sharing real stories instead of trying to out-shout the crowd.
This isn’t a post about how to get the most out of LinkedIn (you can read this if you want that). It’s about speaking normal English and curating your following in a way that’s genuine and not entirely annoying. Taking care to choose the correct words so as not to over-inflate each post like the Hungarian pengő.
You don’t have to shout about being thrilled, humbled, or honoured at every minor professional milestone. Nor do you need to treat LinkedIn like a stage for performative gratitude or over-the-top self-congratulations. Authenticity doesn’t mean downplaying achievements; it means presenting them without the corporate equivalent of interpretive dance. “Thrilled, humbled, and honoured” has become the “thoughts and prayers” of online discourse; both having lost their sincerity through overuse, cheapening them into social currency rather than genuine sentiment.
A casual perusal of LinkedIn reveals more people who are honoured, humbled, and eternally grateful than a papal conclave. Yet none of them invented a cure for cancer, negotiated world peace, or discovered a new planet. Rather, they appear to have attended a webinar on ‘future trends,’ spoke on a panel about supply chain efficiencies or facilitated an icebreaker at the company’s annual offsite. Based on my LinkedIn feed, you’d think they had single-handedly saved humanity from a meteor.
I’m all for celebrating life’s milestones. You should be thrilled when you get promoted or proud of your hard-earned career moves. But LinkedIn takes this to a comical extreme. People are acting as though they’ve just welcomed their firstborn into the world when they’ve really just moderated a panel discussion on the future of accounting software. It’s enough to endure all the beautiful people doing beautiful things on Tik Tok or Instagram or wherever, but LinkedIn describes itself as “the world’s largest professional network on the internet” when, most times, it’s more like a digital high school cafeteria where everyone is trying desperately to seem cooler than they are. It’s the place where delighted, privileged, and thankful have become the holy trinity of false modesty. Instead of thoughtful updates or meaningful reflections, we get a steady stream of overblown self-congratulations, group photos with captions like “What an amazing team!” and the occasional “influencer” offering recycled platitudes about leadership.
Nobody should be overjoyed to announce that they attended a breakfast seminar on corporate synergy or stirred to have participated in a 30-minute virtual fireside chat. Save your euphoric energy for something more deserving—like finding true love, or winning the lottery, or, successfully navigating your morning commute through Marda Loop (if you know, you know).
The reality is, most of life’s work events are, well, fine. Not mind-blowing, not life-changing, not cancer-curing. Just fine. You get paid to do your job, then go home to your family. You get a nametag, drink some mediocre coffee, maybe hand out a few business cards. But you wouldn’t know that on LinkedIn, where every moment is a transformational experience, a religious awakening, a shaman led Ayahuasca journey in some remote Peruvian jungle.
And for the love of God no one is beyond grateful. Beyond grateful is what you are when you find out your house didn’t burn down in a wildfire. You are happy to be part of your team. You like working with them. But let’s not pretend your a.m. huddle was a spiritual experience that left you weeping.
So, what do we do? Is LinkedIn doomed to be the land of exaggerated emotions and humblebrags forever? Maybe. But what if we collectively decided to tone it down a bit? What if we saved our overjoyed and grateful posts for the truly meaningful moments and just admitted that attending a virtual panel is…nice, but not earth-shattering? Perhaps share a thing or two about what we learned, rather than how humbled we were to learn it.
Amid the cacophony of LinkedIn noise, it’s all the more impressive that our resident marketing blackbelt, Kiara Tyler (Marika), has over the past year managed to grow our LinkedIn following the old-fashioned way—by earning it.
It’s been a full year since our merger with Humanis and the rebranding that followed. The transition posed a unique challenge for our digital presence. Over 15+ years, we had carefully built a robust LinkedIn following under the Pekarsky & Co. banner, methodically sharing thoughtful posts and original content that resonated with our audience; an audience that had grown to just under 3,100 carefully curated followers. Unfortunately, when the merger occurred LinkedIn didn’t allow us to simply transfer that hard-earned audience to our new Humanis page.
Instead, we had to start from scratch. Kiara took on the delicate task of encouraging followers to disengage from the Pekarsky & Co. page—a counterintuitive move for any marketer—while simultaneously cultivating fresh engagement with Humanis, a virtually unknown brand in these parts at that time. And you know how she did it? By speaking normal English and curating our following in a way that was genuine and not entirely annoying. Fast forward one year, and not only has our LinkedIn following been rebuilt, but it’s also thriving, with more followers actively engaging with our content than ever before. We are beyond blessed! Kidding aside, it’s partly this success that contributed to Kiara’s recent well-earned promotion, leading the national marketing function for the Humanis Group of Companies. We couldn’t be prouder of her. Like, for real.
Perhaps we can normalize being content or even just fine about our career happenings. Maybe we can resist the temptation to turn every mundane work milestone into a euphoric experience. Maybe one day LinkedIn will be the place for honest updates like: ‘Grateful the conference coffee was tolerable,’ or ‘Happy to attend a panel discussion I was awake for.’ But let’s stop the cycle of people one-upping each other’s delight, turning mundane career moments into endzone touchdown dances. Let’s save those for real life and life’s real victories—those moments that truly merit celebration, reflection, or gratitude. The rest? Maybe it’s okay to just let them be what they are: ordinary steps in the long, often tedious journey of our careers.
Regards,
Adam
