My cursor sat over the “post” button for a solid two minutes before I made myself click it.
Nothing dramatic in that post. Just something true, and a little unpolished. And I still almost didn’t hit publish, because a small voice in my head said… this is going to feel embarrassing in ten minutes. 🫣
I posted it anyway. Cheers to that! 🥂
Here’s the thing… the posts that make you wince a little before you publish are usually the ones worth publishing.
Not because discomfort is magic. Because the wince is a signal. It means there’s an actual person behind the words taking an actual risk… instead of a safe paraphrase of what a thousand other accounts already said this week. ✨
And I have receipts on this one. 📊
I had a full year of my own LinkedIn analyzed recently, and the results were humbling in the best way:
➡️ My top posts were ALL personal. A real photo, a real story, me being a human.
➡️ My beautiful branded quote graphics? Middle of the pack. Every single time.
➡️ Not one branded graphic and not one “thought leadership” post cracked my highest emotional-connection content. Not one. 😅
➡️ And one of my best posts of the entire year was about my first solo work trip after leaving corporate. The thing the data credited for it? Vulnerability.
I’m a marketer. I make beautiful branded things for a living! And my own audience told me, very clearly, that they’d rather have me.
Why this matters even more right now 🤖
I read content all day, and lately so much of it reads the same. Same structure, same rhythm, same reassuring-but-empty phrases. You feel the sameness before you can name it… like walking into a hundred hotel lobbies decorated from the same design brief.
That’s not an accident. Polished, competent, forgettable content has never been easier or cheaper to produce. Which means it’s also never been worth less.
When everyone can sound smooth… smooth stops setting you apart. Smooth becomes the floor.
I use AI every single day and I’ll defend it as a tool all day long. It’s my brainstorming buddy! But it can’t have been in the room. It can’t be nervous. It can’t tell you about the client conversation that changed how you think about your whole business.
In a feed where anyone can manufacture the polish, the only thing actually scarce anymore is you. Your specifics. Your judgment. Your slightly awkward truth.
Content that’s been smoothed over, whether by a machine or just by over-editing, reads generic even when every sentence is technically correct. People feel the absence of a person before they can explain why. I believe that instinct is sharper in all of us than we give it credit for.
The cringe doesn’t go away. I don’t think it’s supposed to! But I’d rather publish something imperfect and true than something flawless and forgettable.
Just hit that post button! 💜
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