Believe this: You are exquisite. You are exceptional. You are limitless.

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Believe this: You are exquisite. You are exceptional. You are limitless.

Really, you aren’t.

You’re limited: However exquisite you may be, you’re definitely not limitless: you have two arms, two legs, a limited concentration span, you can’t multi-task and you’re going to be pushing up daisies before the century is out. Sorry, fella: you have a shelf-life, so make the most of it.

But for many of you already will have made the most of it. Whatever small fame you have acquired yet surpasses your own level of incompetence, and you should be more grateful than your LinkedIn feed suggests you are that no-one who matters has worked this out yet. For most of you, this will be because the fellow best placed to work it out — your line manager — is just as as far past hers as you are past yours.

You’re unexceptional: With “exceptional” we immediately bump up against a definitional bound. Sorry, LinkedIn, there is some bad news: you aren’t all exceptional. You can’t all be an exception. This isn’t our usual bitter contrarianism but simple logic: an exception requires a rule and, odds are, you’re it: your role in the grand cosmic scheme is to sit there, grimly hacking away in the mediocre middle; helping to form a dreary collective yardstick against which better men and women than you can be measured.

And if that’s not sobering enough, at least half of you should be pleased you have made it even into the middle: fully 50% of the exceptional are the exceptionally dim, dull and slow-witted. There, but for the extreme hopelessness of some other poor soul, go you.

You’re not exquisite: Not in a good way, at any rate. The internets tell us that exquisite is means “extremely beautiful and delicate; intensely felt.” Certainly, sensibilities on LinkedIn are uncommonly delicate, we don’t think that’s quite the sense of “exquisite” you had in mind.

The thing about extremes is that they are a comparative minority, and you judge them by their distance from the big dull lump in between. The lump where, most likely, you and I will pass our days. If you take inspiration from the pearls LinkedIn’s thought leaders and influencers cast before the collective sty, the smart money says, whoever you are, you’re not at the good end of the talent distribution.