Slow Down If You Want to Be Someone With Something to Say
The fastest path to success is to slow down.
Slow down if you want to be a person who has something to say. Bob Dylan internalized this lesson in 1961. He was 19 and had been swimming in the Greenwich Village music scene soup for a year. He wasn’t breaking out, nor did he think he deserved to; he called his work “ok.”
Then it struck him: “I did everything fast. Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast. I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.”
Even non-Dylan fans can’t deny that he made a difference. His Nobel Prize in Literature testifies.
I think everyone has something to say, yet 93.6% of us don’t slow down to say it. I know because I counted. Today, I read and classified the first 216 posts in my LinkedIn feed. One hundred seventy-one were lazy, boasting, or overtly promotional; 6.4% showed effort.
Authenticity is rare but not hard. Just slow down. Try it now. Pick a post you want to share. Pause for 60 seconds. Think about what YOU find interesting about it. Write that down in YOUR voice.
NOW click share.
As Bob Dylan shows us, slowing down pays off. Try it in 2022. We want to know what you have to say.
APPENDIX: Classification of LinkedIn Posts on My Timeline, 12/19/2021
This morning, I took an hour to scroll through my LinkedIn feed and classified the first 216 posts on 7 dimensions (clockwise, from 7:00):
Raw Reshares (20%): Reshares of other people’s content without a personal take, summary, or reason why I should check it out.
Company Promotion (32%): Overt company promotion by employees (ads excluded).
Self-Promotion (18%): Bragging. Self-promotion. Showing off.
Thought Leader (15%): Posts by “professional thought leaders”
Look at Me! (9%): Context-free posts about something you did. Meaning, there was no lesson learned, advice, or moral to the story
Authentic OTT Share (5.5%): Reshares with a comment “Over The Top” about WHY it’s meaningful, valuable, interesting, funny, or insightful
Authentic Posts (0.9%): Original writing by average people (meaning, people who don’t write as a profession)
I carefully curate and read a few “thought leaders.” I grouped them with authentic individuals in green: 21% of my feed is valuable. Everyone else, 79%, is spam.
If everyone slowed down, we could make a dent in that 79% of annoying social media posts!
