The most significant thing that has ever happened to me — outside of the birth of my children — occurred on a July night in 2014: I went viral on LinkedIn.
Seriously, it was that significant.
I had read an article earlier that day about how worthless an online degree was. A significant portion of my own education occurred online, including my two master’s degrees, yet this writer went on and on about how meaningless my education was.
To borrow Michael Jordan’s famous quote from “The Last Dance,” “It became personal with me.”
In fact, I took it so personally that I wrote an article about it and posted it to my LinkedIn feed using their blog feature. I had no intention of turning that blog post into a career or becoming an “influencer” — a term I’m not sure even existed at the time.
What I wanted to do was speak up for people like me. People whose parents didn’t go to college. People who became parents before they could go to school. People who grew up believing that places like Harvard or Yale might as well be the moon.
Apparently, there are a lot of people like me. After I posted the article, a voice told me to go back and look at it. I saw that 900 people had already viewed it — and it had only been up for three minutes.
The willingness to share
I spent the rest of that night in front of my computer, watching the world turn. When the day dawned in Pakistan, I got new likes and followers from Pakistan, a nation with an entirely different education system.
But you know what? We are all humans, and humans can recognize BS when they see it — no matter where they were born. Including BS like the idea that the only intelligent people in the world graduated from a fistful of universities in New England.
I was immediately hooked on sharing my thoughts.
My following on that platform grew from 400 connections to over 103,000 followers. LinkedIn supported my writing, and I have been part of their Top Voice program since its inception. Almost as soon as that happened, I started getting asked to speak at events. I’ve done that for the past 11 years, including most recently at Utah Tech Week.
To put it bluntly, when I talk about LinkedIn, people want to know one thing: How do I become like you?
There is only one answer: To be a thought leader, you’ve got to have thoughts that lead people.
You’ve got to be brave, bold and original. You’ve got to be willing to lose followers, not constantly wondering how you can gain them.
Saying the quiet part out loud
When I worked as a communications consultant in St. Louis, Missouri, I occasionally teamed up with a friend, Pat, who taught at the university. Our bios and résumés were very similar. There was only one major difference between us: He is Black. I am white.
When I would meet with a potential client in the banking sector, I would wear my suit and play the role of the trustworthy, blue-eyed white guy from Utah. But when I would visit my blue-collar clients, I would ditch the suit and roll my sleeves up, letting my heavily tattooed arms say what my mouth didn’t need to: I am not really a fancy consultant with a graduate degree.
With my sleeves rolled up, I am just one of the boys.
That flexibility wasn’t possible for Pat. He had to be suited up all the time. If he showed his arm tattoos, people would make assumptions about him that they would never make about me.
Pat couldn’t adjust his identity based on the potential client in front of him, which robbed him of a trick all effective salespeople use: the ability to convey a message that says, “Despite what you see, I’m really just like you.”
Pat couldn’t be several different things to several different clients. He could be one thing and one thing only: the “good” Black.
I could be whatever my clients needed me to be. Pat could only be what his clients expected him to be.
Seeing that reality with my own eyes led me to write “The Difference Between Me and My Black Friend Like Me.” The article received several thousand likes and a few hundred comments, most of which were positive.
I didn’t talk about the term “privilege” as a concept. I simply pointed out the reality: I can roll up my sleeves and show my tattoos to help land or keep a client. My friend can’t — because he is Black.
He is forever judged by an entirely different and deeply unfair standard.
Being a blue-eyed white guy from Utah writing about race in St. Louis takes guts. It also takes being slightly crazy, but there is a difference between “crazy crazy” and a term I like to call “the good kind of crazy.”
Do you want to be a thought leader? Be the good kind of crazy.
Step up. Speak up. Shout, if that’s what it takes.
Don’t worry about keywords or hashtags. You can’t keyword your way to having a voice that matters. What you can do is use your platform — whether it’s LinkedIn, your church, your work or the time you spend with your kids before they go to bed at night — to stand up and speak the truth.
Leave the political narratives behind. Don’t let a politician tell you something doesn’t exist when you can see it right in front of your own eyes.
I didn’t want to debate white privilege. I simply wanted to speak up for my friend who can’t even roll up his sleeves — much less call out the same business community that forced him to keep his sleeves rolled down.
Let your courage do the talking
Right now, some of the most vulnerable people in your community are getting absolutely crushed solely for the sake of political narratives.
If reading that makes you angry at me, that’s fine. I didn’t write this article to gain more followers. I wrote this because, despite how overused the term is, we need actual thought leaders. We need more people who will use their platforms — no matter how small — to stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves.
If that’s not your thing, that’s OK. But please, spare us the millionth post on AI written by ChatGPT. Leave the leadership — thought or otherwise — to people who are willing to lose followers if it means doing and saying the right thing.
When you do that, you don’t need to worry about hashtags. Real leaders are too busy to think about those things anyway. Instead, they let their courage do the talking.
