I’ve been running a personal experiment.
I’ve posted on LinkedIn every single day for 388 days.
This is not a letter about consistency. It’s about the madness that I’ve been exposed to from doing this.
Haven’t you seen it for yourself?
People using ChatGPT to create posts on LinkedIn. You can smell the content from a mile away.
Very structured.
Over manicured.
Too many emojis.🤮
Even agent Smith from the Matrix will say “Come on, guys. Let’s do better.”
But that’s not the madness itself. The madness begins with the “reply guys” and their thoughtless replies. If you’re not familiar with the term, “reply guys” are the first set of people that respond to a post. It helps the person that posts and the first replier get traction. Hey, don’t get me wrong, if you’re in this social media game, you need reply guys.
But not these new-age reply guys.
These reply guys use ChatGPT to reply to comments.
I see it all the time. It starts this way: “Nifemi, great point…” They summarize what I just wrote and then ask me a question about what I just explained in the post.
So imagine someone using ChatGPT to create their posts and the reply guys using ChatGPT to comment.
Full blown Madness.
We might all as well retire our intellect and let the machines have their conversations while we sit back, eat chips, and watch.
But don’t grow weary, my friend.
We are actually in very interesting times and this demonstration of craze presents an opportunity.
If everyone is rushing to have soulless machine conversations, all you have to do is the opposite. Share real-life human stories, which are way more impactful.
All my LinkedIn posts that performed better than average had something personal in them. (That’s a story for another time).
Look! Here’s the reality.
AI can’t think for you.
It does not have your decades of life experiences.
It does not have your unique perspective.
That story – it’s in your mind, you felt it, you synthesized it in your own peculiar way.
In an era of “machine-talk,” your human story is the most important leverage you have.
3 Ways to humanize your stories
When I wrote Press Play, I interviewed a bunch of musicians and entrepreneurs to get insights for my first book.
I tried my best to squeeze in every thought, idea, and phrase said by these experts. When I sent my manuscript to my beta reading community, one of the feedbacks I got was to use a more active voice but the next one was: “it’s nice to hear about these cool artists but we want to hear what YOU think.”
That really opened my eyes.
I thought people would rather learn more from these accomplished people than little ol’ me. My readers wanted expert insights but filtered through my perspective.
When you realize that your personal story is so unique, you will wake up to what is right in front of you and start communicating it to get more out of life.
It will help you understand yourself better, connect with the right people, and funny enough, make life a lot more interesting.
Here are three ways to convey more interesting stories with a personal touch.
1. Make data more relatable
A mentor once told me: “Nifemi, when they zig, you zag.”
The world is going “more data, less human.”
Buck the trend and go the other direction.
Go “more human, less data.” Especially when it comes to storytelling.
Data is boring.
The Internet is filled with it. Claude and ChatGPT will quote it. That boring guy at your office brings it up at every all hands meeting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to make decisions, build neural networks, and follow scientific pursuits but it sucks at telling stories. Data supports a narrative but it is not the narrative itself.
The human brain can’t really comprehend the growing amount of data that we deal with.
For instance, what does 5 Gigabytes of data mean to you?
You know it’s more than 3 Gigabytes and less than 10. But it doesn’t really hit home. You want to humanize the data by grounding it in experiences that humans can relate to.
Instead of 5 Gigabytes, you could try what Steve Jobs did when he first introduced the iPod in 2001. To emphasize the 5 Gigabytes storage capacity of the iPod, Steve Jobs on stage, holds out the iPod and says “this device holds 1000 songs and it goes right into my pocket.”
“1000 songs in your pocket” is more relatable than “5 Gigabytes of storage capacity”
Anchor your audience’s mind by making data more relatable.
2. Share personal experiences
You’ve heard it before.
7 ways to get better at life.
11 ways to actively avoid burnout.
13 steps to your next attractive career.
The Internet is littered with guides. A lot are just echoing one another. They’ve not lived through these experiences to have an opinion but as I mentioned in a previous letter, the barrier to content creation is getting lower.
The best way to grow is to get knowledge from someone who has lived through what you want to learn, like a mentor. For instance, as an entrepreneur, I only take advice about building a business from people that have run a business, even if their business failed. As a writer, I’ll only trust writing advice from people that have tried writing, even if they struggle to publish.
Now, if you find me giving you cooking advice, block your ears and run.
Your experience is your credibility.
And you convey your experience through personal stories that ChatGPT can’t write for you.
Whenever you write something, a deck, a sales email, a memo, ask yourself: Why am I the person writing this? What about my personal experience can I infuse to differentiate the message and help build more credibility?
Tell your story.
3. Do the work.
Your life is your homework.
Sometime last year, I read the book, Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks. I’d advise anyone who wants to get better at communicating and telling stories to pick up a copy. As he told his personal story, the author shared some easy to follow practices and tools to help readers bring their story to life, every day.
One of those, he calls “homework for life”
It goes like this:
- Create a journal (I use my note app on my phone)
- Call it “Homework for life”
- At the end of each day, spend about two minutes writing down one line about the most significant things that happened in your day.
- Put a date beside it. That’s it.
- Do it every evening.
By the end of one month, you’ll have 30 stories and 365 stories by the end of the year.
I try to do this daily. Although, I only get to it every other day or once a week. Besides, having something to always pull out a personal story from, doing this “homework for life” has an added effect:it makes your life more interesting.
You’re forced to find interesting things in life to write down, breaking you out of the mundane.
And when it’s time to write or share a story, you have a bag of ideas to choose from.
Do the homework for life.
Final thoughts
Your story is your main source of inspiration and leverage.
Tell it to differentiate in an era of machine-talk. Make data more relatable, infuse your personal experience to build credibility, and develop a practice of writing down daily experiences.
Your life is interesting. You just have to pay attention.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
P.S. Five months ago, I published a book about infusing soul into technology. If you haven’t read Musta’s Mixtape yet, I hope you take some time to check it out.
