If You Don't Have Something To Say

Until last week, I’ve been posting on LinkedIn every day for months. Most days I actually had something worth saying. But "most days" isn't "every day," and that gap is where the problem comes from. On the days I didn't have anything, I posted anyway, because I told myself consistency mattered. Nobody cares about, I mean engages with, those posts. And why should they? If I didn't feel I needed to share something, why should anybody want to read it? But rest assured, I'm feeling something writing this! More on this powerful topic down below.

If You're Not Excited, Why Should They Be

The standard marketing advice is to post every day, stay top of mind, and feed the algorithm. That's how you end up with two kinds of feeds: the ones with something to say, and the ones filling a slot because Thursday came around again. Nobody has trouble telling the difference.

This is what happens when you force consistency without something real behind it. You default to the safe stuff. Communication is key. Know your audience. Culture matters. None of it is wrong. But it's all boring, and boring is worse than silent, because it tells people exactly who you are: someone who publishes on a schedule and has nothing to add to the bigger conversation.

I keep a notebook for exactly this reason. Not a content list or calendar but a notebook. Anytime something catches my attention… a conversation, a scene from a show, something my daughter said, a headline that has nothing to do with work, I write it down. Most of it has nothing to do with business when it happens. I'm not trying to find a clever angle when I'm writing it down. I trust that if it stirred something in me, there's a reason.

Days or even weeks later, I'll flip back through it and one of those notes connects to something happening in my life, at The Bureau, or a decision I'm wrestling with. Suddenly I have something real to share instead of something I feel obligated to post. That's the difference between an original idea and a scheduled post. One comes from paying attention to what's going on in your life. The other comes from staring at a blinking cursor struggling to remember what you posted the day before.

That's why people who experiment in public, share real struggles, or tell the truth as they see it have popular posts. They don't care what the algorithm says regarding topics or timing. They have something to say that's going to break through all that synthetic scum that's growing on everything.

On top of that, you don't see their posts all the time because if they don't have something to say, they don't say anything. We could all learn from that. 

The test of what's valuable hasn't changed for me. Did this genuinely excite me, worry me, teach me something, or make me laugh? What's changed is where I look for the answer. Not a content calendar. Not a Google search, but the world around me. And if nothing on a particular day is asking to be written yet, that's fine. It's only a matter of time in this wacky world.