Hey weirdo,
Last time I wrote about websites that don't sound like you, and how playing it safe on your homepage is the quickest way to become invisible. Some of you wrote back with some version of the same confession: "I know my homepage is generic. I'm working on it."
Good! Keep going. There's the plot twist a lot of you are walking straight into though, and I want you to be ready.
You fix the homepage. You sit down to write a LinkedIn post. You write something real — the pattern you noticed last week, or the moment in a meeting when you saw something nobody else saw. You read it back. And then, quietly, you start deleting the real parts. I've done this three times just writing this email.
The strong opinion softens into a question. The actual story dissolves into a tip with a takeaway.
You post it and nothing happens. You blame the algorithm for the deafening silence.
The pattern: you keep deleting the real thing
I do this. I've done it this week, today too. There's a post sitting in my drafts that has been edited seventeen times, and each round made it a little more polished and a little less mine.
The first version said something specific about how a colleague had named what I actually do — she said I'm a product person who does the marketing part. By the seventeenth round, that had become a generic thought-leader paragraph about positioning that could have been written by anyone. Hell, it probably HAS been.
There's no editor and no algorithm asking for that totally bland take. The censor is calling from inside the house, and that's the whole problem.
Why the draft folder is braver than the feed
Here's what I've started to notice about that seventeen-edits process: the deletions are not random.
What I delete are the specific things, the sharp edges, the potentially controversial things. The point gets rounded into a circle, and the colour gets dulled, and the next thing you know, another white bread bland post that means absolutely nothing to anyone.
Specific means claimable. Claimable means someone could push back. Generic is unchallengeable. Nobody argues with "authenticity is important in branding." Nobody remembers it either. Nobody forwards it. Nobody feels like they just met you, and they surely don't feel closer to you.
The draft folder is where the actual work lives. What we post is often the sanitized afterthought.
The post I almost deleted
Let me show you what I mean.
Earlier this month I drafted a post about something I've been calling "the legibility problem." It went through four full rewrites.
In the first version, I quoted what that colleague had told me. Her read was that I'm a product person who happens to do the marketing part, and that the companies who need me most are the ones who've built something valuable but can't make the market care.
By the third draft, I'd cut the quote. Too personal. Who cares what one person said to me? Replace it with a more generalized observation, I thought. That will land with a broader audience.
By the fourth draft, the post was publishable and inert. It sounded like a ChatGPT summary of fifty other LinkedIn posts about positioning.
So I put the quote back. I put the messiness back. The post still isn't live. I'm sitting with it. But I know what I'm choosing between.
If I publish the fourth draft, I spend my scarce content energy on something any consultant could have written. If I publish the first draft, I put something into the world that could only have come from me. Someone will read it and either recognize themselves in it, or not. And the people who do will know something real about how I think.
One of those is worth doing. The other is content theatre in a nice font.
The reframe
Polish is not the same as quality.
Editing gets a reputation it mostly hasn't earned. More often than we admit, it takes us out of our own writing. The specific gets smoothed into the general. The moment of actual thought becomes a tip with a takeaway.
Your unedited, slightly-too-personal draft is the version that sounds like you. That's the one that does the work. The seventeenth-edit version is a wax figure of your thinking.
The goal of your content is to let someone feel like they just met you. If you're not in it, it isn't doing the job.
One thing to try
Go find your drafts folder. Whatever app it lives in. Pick the post you almost published and pulled back from. Read the earliest version beside the latest.
Ask yourself: where did I delete the specific? What moment of my actual experience got compressed into a generic lesson?
Put one thing back. The messy quote. Or the reason this matters specifically to you. That's all.
Post it like that.
Some of you will delete the post again before hitting publish. That's information too. Notice what exactly you cannot yet bear to let people see. That's the edge. Being legible to your people is the patient, incremental work of widening what you can stand to have visible.
Now that AI is making everything exponentially more generic — it's the rough edges and mess of being a human that's ultimately going to help us stand out. Let those freak flags fly.
That's issue #2. If it landed, forward to a friend that needs to be seen like you see them ;)
In two weeks: another pattern hiding in plain sight.
— Kate
Kate Dole runs Growth Grove, a strategic consulting & design practice for good folks & businesses looking to beat the plateau. She makes the invisible, seen.