Be the best version of yourself

Crappy advice you find on LinkedIn™ →Go uptown Don’t dream it — be it. An occasional paean to the empty-headed aspirational gems that gush from from LinkedIn’s wellspring of bunk. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Rubbish maxims LinkedIn: Your best version... | Your value ... | Inspirational you... | A candle in the wind... | Every boss... | Every journey... | We rise... | We lift you up... | You are dynamite... | Your example... | Game-changers and their aspirants Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Be the best version of yourself , unless your Shakespearean flaw is lack of judgment, self-awareness or common sense, of course. Which, if your susceptibility for fatuous LinkedIn wisdom is anything to go by, it is.

If it is, sailor, you are hardly well-positioned to judge which version of yourself is the best one out there. Now maybe there’s a better version of yourself — one with a keener sense of self-awareness, for example — but, in our working theory, remember, you’re not presently it. You wouldn’t recognise it if it hit you in the face, which there’s a fair chance it would, if the two of you met.

And what would this better version of you say to you? It would tell your present you that you haven’t, as currently configured, got the gumption to find it. What would your present you say to this better you? You wouldn’t recognise it. O tempora! O paradox!

So you’re stuffed. You could ask a friend you trust — but seeing as, Q.E.D., your judgment of your friends isn’t much better, that won’t work either.

But , okay — let’s say for a moment it isn’t. Let’s grant you that you are self-aware enough to acknowledge your fixable shortcomings. You know them, and you can fix them. So have you fixed them? Or was it only your life coach’s wit and wisdom — vouchsafed to you through the good offices of LinkedIn — that brought you to this epiphany? Well — what are you waiting for?

There’s a better version of you out there, somewhere in conceptual design space, just waiting to be been.