Don’t simply perform it

LinkedIn has been exhausting me lately. Anyone else?!

And I say that as someone who really likes LinkedIn. I’ve met wonderful people there who I fully fangirl over, and it’s introduced me to ideas and humans that cracked my brain open in the best way. But in the last three months especially, my feed reads like one very long post written by one very confident person who has “learned three things about [insert specifically generic thing here].”

I work at an AI education company, so I hear about AI-generated content all day long. And I use AI, because I think these tools can be incredibly useful (especially for someone whose executive function takes extended vacations). But it’s started to feel like every post needs a lesson and a neat little bow of thought leadership on top.

Then there’s Bridget Poetker.

Bridget spoke at Growclass’s Personal Brand Summit in September. Her session was called Underrated career skill: being unhinged on LinkedIn. And that title is inccccredibly accurate and representative. That’s her feed!

She posts memes, rants, work jokes, and thoughts that very clearly came out of her own head. I never know what she’s going to post next, and I can usually tell it’s her before I even see her name–hence why she spoke at our personal brand summit!

While the summit was all about getting your special flavour out into the world in an authentic way, what stuck out most about her session (and as evidenced through her feed) is how much she’s tried. For example, she posted publicly when she got laid off and landed 30+ interviews in three weeks. She started a podcast with someone she met on LinkedIn, and later used DMs to find side work that turned into clients. The big “lessons” I took from her session were pretty simple: try something, see what happens, pay attention, talk to people, try another thing, and remember it’s just work.

This has been particularly rattling around my brain because this week I taught a webinar for the Metricool community on our Growclass AI Archetypes (which is really fun and you should definitely take it!!!). My archetype is the Collaborator… shocking absolutely no one who knows me. I love talking things through. I love tossing a half-baked idea into Slack and hearing someone say, “Yes, and what if...” Give me an idea that’s 70% there and let’s find the other 30% together.

Some of my favourite moments at Growclass are when someone brings a hurdle to a team meeting, and we collectively jam on it. All the weird, “what if” ideas allllllways lead to something incredibly useful, and we give it a try (what’s the worst that can happen?!). Sometimes it works beautifully and sometimes those experiments are less than successful, but both are always useful because now we have information. And that, my friends, is what we in the biz call *experimentation*.

Bridget and the Collaborator in me are saying the same thing: give people something real enough to respond to. A half-baked idea in Slack, a funny feminist reflection, a project you’re not sure will work. It’s the human, slightly unfinished stuff that others can build on. Partnerships work the same way. The good ones start when someone says “what if we…” and the other side builds on it.

So before I try something new (especially right now, when everyone’s counting dollars and planning for January), I’ve started asking myself one question: are we doing this for money’s sake, or for our community’s sake?

Both matter. We’re a business! But when the answer is only money, people can tell. When it’s community, even the flops teach you something about the people you’re trying to serve.

That’s the spirit behind our Growth & Experimentation in 2027 Summit on November 17. Four experts are digging into measurement, feedback loops, paid ads, and building an experimentation program that actually teaches you something!

So here’s my ask going into the next months and through 2027: don’t simply perform it. Put enough of yourself into the work that someone can respond, and then actually listen to what they say.

And tell me: what’s one thing you tried this year that didn’t land, and what did it teach you? 

Until next time... waving,
Tal