Believe this: You are exquisite. You are exceptional. You are limitless.
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Crappy advice you find on LinkedIn™
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Believe this: You are exquisite. You are exceptional. You are limitless.
You really 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 run out of gas before the century is out. But many of you will have surpassed your level of incompetence and ought to be more grateful than your LinkedIn feed suggests you are that no-one’s worked this out yet. For most of you this will be because the fellow to whom you report is a moron as well.
You're unexceptional: With “exceptional” we immediately bump up against a definitional bound. Sorry, LinkedIn, I have bad news: you aren’t all exceptional. Three quarters of you can’t be. This isn’t our usual bitter contrarianism but simple logic: for there to be an exception there needs to be a rule and, odds are, you’re it. Your role in life is to sit there grimly hacking away in the mediocre middle; you, as a collective, form a dreary yardstick against which we measure real outliers. If that’s not sobering enough, at least half of you should be pleased you made it into the middle and that you’re not exceptional, since there are as many exceptionally dim people as there are good ones.
You’re not exquisite. Not in a good way, at any rate: The internets tell us that exquisite is an adjective meaning “extremely beautiful and delicate; intensely felt,” anbd while it seems 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 comparatively small, and you judge them by reference to the big dull lump between them. If you are seeking motivation from vacuous thought leaders on LinkedIn our money says, whever you are, you’re not at the good end of the talent distribution.