Not Counting Followers

I used to keep a quiet eye on my LinkedIn follower count. Nothing obsessive. Just a habit I developed in the months after my first viral post. I didn't really notice until I realised I was checking it every other day without thinking.

It started as curiosity. Then curiosity became a habit. Then the habit became the thing that determined whether the work felt worth it.

When you track a number closely, it stops measuring progress and starts measuring your mood.

Some days that number would jump by thousands and I'd feel like I'd figured something out. Then I'd check again the next morning, hoping it would happen again.

I could feel the work starting to bend. Writing became about chasing that feeling instead of chasing the idea I wanted to say.

So I stopped checking. No announcement. No "I'm taking a break" post. I just quietly stopped looking at it.

And it turns out, when you remove the number, what's left is just the work. You write because you have something to say. You hit publish and move on. The work stops being a bid for approval and starts being what it always should have been: something you made because making it mattered to you.

I write this newsletter because I enjoy writing. I create posts on LinkedIn because I enjoy making graphics, quotes and memes. It's the work that drives me these days. That's surprisingly easy to forget when you're watching a counter and letting it tell you whether any of it was worth doing.

Not counting followers is how I remembered why I started.

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Three things that happened this week that got me thinking about this:

1) I saw loads of posts this week in my feed about the LinkedIn algorithm being broken. People complaining that reach is down, engagement is tanking, it's not worth it anymore. What they're really saying is the results don't justify the effort. And they're right, if results are the only reason you're doing it. If you're only in it for the reach, every algorithm will let you down eventually.

2) I got a DM from someone who read a post I wrote over a year ago. They said it had stuck with them and they'd shared it with their team. It wasn’t a viral post, but it found the right person eventually and that made my day.

3) I found an old notebook from 2019 with ideas I'd written for myself. No audience, no strategy, no plan to do anything with them. Some of the thinking in there is sharper than stuff I've published. Turns out I was better at this when no one was watching.