(Inspired by Seth)
Don’t ever send me a message on LinkedIn.
Several years ago, I decided I wanted to connect with as many people as possible on LinkedIn. It was partly just an experiment, i.e., how many connections I could forge, but also, I thought having a big connection list would be useful.
Boy, was I wrong.
As of this writing, I have 13547 LinkedIn connections. Which means I basically have zero connections.
Because now I get so many messages per day, 99.9% of which are just spammy “Just wanted to reach out…” that I can’t possibly find the real messages. I have a signal-to-noise ratio problem. So much noise comes through that I can’t filter out the signal.
I know many people have this same problem with email. You get a thousand emails a day. Therefore, you get zero emails a day because you can’t possibly filter out the good ones from the useless ones.
Hyperbole is easy in today’s always-connected-all-the-time world. A hyperbolic number of messages with hyperbolic messaging in each one. A race to out-hyperbole your competition is a race to the bottom.
The irony of this hyperbole is the isolation it breeds. A reminder to seek the depth of meaningful connection over the breadth of
hyperbole.
Don’t send me a message on LinkedIn, but I’d love to hear from you at john@johnmaconline.com.
