#34 - ARE PEOPLE TOO NICE ON LINKEDIN?

ISSUE #34

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living. - Victor Hugo

IS THAT ALL THERE IS?

I am not a Linkedin expert and I am not even sure if I am a Linkedin fan. The fact is that my Linkedin experience is like walking in a boring area of a great city. You know a lot is going on but you can’t find your way to the party. You walk around in Berlin thinkin "is that all there is"? Linkedin, is that all there is?

What do I look for? I look for smart people whose reasoning blows my top off? Somebody who shows their expertise in the answers they give. You know like people who talk with clarity demonstrating their grasp of things. You don’t have to agree with them; just enjoy the way they build their case. The kind of people who don’t give the standard run-of-the-mill answers.

Why do I look for them? I am working on a solution to eradicate generational poverty (genpoverty) in the world. Yeah, I know a bit over-the-top ambitious. But hey, that is me. And the work is accelerating in Notion.com. Boy, what a breakthrough app that is. It is like going from a Toyota Yaris to a slow Ferrari. So, I am doing fine building the mockup of the platform but I am not smart enough to carry the ball further. So that is why I walk around in the city of Linkedin looking for exceptional talent.

But I must have been sidetracked to the boring neighborhoods because I see only well-behaved, nice people saying nice things to other nice people. They congratulate people on finding a new job or finishing a course. People congratulate me on the working anniversary that I did not know I had. I don’t do these things. Maybe I am not such a nice person. Maybe I am just a male bitch.

I don’t think Linkedin should be a platform for exchanging niceties. Is Facebook not build for that? How do you discover exceptional talent if people only say the standard nice things. We all know nice is boring. And boring is not exceptional. Although in certain parts of the world being nice is a good way to survive.

The annual report by California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board showed that California law enforcement searched teenagers who officer perceived to be Black at nearly 6 times the rate of teens believed to be white during vehicle and pedestrian stops in 2021.

NICE IS SO 1980

On Linkedin nice is a bit counterproductive. If you are looking for a job then you need to stand out of the crowd. Most people think that diplomas do the job. No, no no, that is so 1980s thinking. Wake up, we are now in 2023 and college degrees mean even less today than yesterday. Standing out in the crowd means showing that you are the wo/men with the solutions. And the only way to do it is by publicly expressing your opinions and solutions. How great would Linkedin be if we had in-depth back and forths in which people would reply with clarity, wit, and even with controlled emotions?

But maybe that is what is going on. Maybe I don’t see it because I am walking in the boring parts of Rio de Janeiro. Well, I know it can not be Studio 54 all the time but if the exceptional talent could just hit the record button once in a while, it would be Barcelona’s Barrio Viejo on a Saturday night.

And remember don’t be bland nice because you don’t want to be boring if you have the talent to stand out. And it is not only me who dislikes bland niceties. Listen to what Australian journalist Amy Remeikis has to say on the topic.

“I am not nice. I despise ‘nice’. Nice in our social construct is just another weapon to keep us silent. To keep us in our place. Because if we drill down into it, nice is just another form of oppression. To be nice is to be passive and in many cases dishonest. Being nice is a way of forcing someone into doing nothing, saying nothing, and standing for nothing, because it may cause someone else discomfort. And so it is used as part of the armory of civility, wielded by those who hold power and are actively engaged in not feeling discomfort, in holding onto the way that things always have been. Because those ways have always been very, very comfortable for them. They’ve been very nice. Discomfort is for the not-nice among us.”

BETTER BE NICE .... SOMETIMES

To be sure that we understand each other. My argument is not to encourage people to be rude. Rude is beyond boring; it is the ultimate expression of not-interesting. The opposite of nice is to be to the point by overwhelming people with a clear logic that makes your solutions stand out even for those who disagree with you. It is the skill of skills to convey to others what you stand for.

To those who do not get my point, I am not worthy of your attention because this article is me. To them, I might be just a boring, non-interesting dude who wastes his time writing incoherent nonsense. To others (those exceptionally talented), it might be a reason to contact me. Whatever it is I continue my search for exceptional talent who want to build the ultimate platform that over time will change the world fundamentally by eradicating poverty.

And we won’t achieve that by being nice. Don’t be bland nice unless the police stop your car for a broken tail light. In that case, be super nice – your life may depend on it.

THE END