Polished vs. Interesting

 

We've confused being polished with being interesting. And I blame that on ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest of the AI gang.

Not because AI is bad at writing. It's often annoyingly competent. It can organize ideas, tidy up sentences and produce something perfectly acceptable in seconds. That's exactly the problem. "Perfectly acceptable" is becoming the new default.

The result? We're wallpapering the internet with competence.

But as a writer, my goal is not just competence. It’s about developing memorable ideas … and they rarely arrive dressed sensibly. They stumble in sideways. They start as a throwaway comment, a ridiculous comparison, or a question that makes everyone in the room pause for a second longer than feels comfortable. Creativity has always had the manners of a scruffy dog. It wanders off the path, rolls in something questionable, then somehow comes back carrying exactly what you needed.

Algorithms don't really do that. They smooth the edges. They average things out. They're brilliant at predicting the next word. Less brilliant at inventing the sentence that shouldn't work but somehow does.

That's why I'm becoming suspicious of anything that feels too neat. The perfect LinkedIn post. The flawless marketing framework. The universal formula for creativity. They all remind me of hotel artwork. Technically fine, but nobody has ever gone back to look at it.

Maybe the competitive advantage isn't working harder to sound professional. Maybe it's refusing to sand off the rough edges that make your thinking recognizably yours. Different has always looked a little weird at first. That's usually how you know it's worth paying attention to.

Don’t confuse being competent with being compelling. They're not the same thing. One gets approval. The other gets remembered.

LinkedIn and AI Slop

Every few months, the internet invents a new button that's supposed to save us from ourselves.

This time it's LinkedIn’s "Seems like AI slop."

My first response was positive, but then I started asking questions: 

• Who’s reviewing these reports? 
  
  
• What action will be taken by the person/people doing the reviewing? 
  
  
• What’s the likelihood of people just using it to report anything they simply don't like?

Hmmmm, maybe the answer isn't another reporting tool.

Maybe it's scrolling past things that don't deserve your attention whether it’s AI generated slop or human generated slop. You know what I’m talking about: the content equivalent of instant mashed potatoes … technically food, but nobody's excited about it. Generic. Weightless. Beige. Gone from your memory before you've finished scrolling.

Not everything needs a button. The best way to kill bad content is to starve it, not report it.

_________________________

One more question for you: Is this a move from LI to limit AI posts/comments or just another way to train the AI they offer to write your posts/comments?

Warning

 

The White House wants a sign at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History warning visitors that its exhibits were created by people who "don't want you to love your country." The claim is that the museum has been captured by a "radical, activist ideology" and can't be trusted to tell America's story honestly. In other words, politicians with agendas should decide which parts of history you're allowed to see.

But a museum with exhibits about slavery doesn't want you to hate America. It wants you to see America. The real one: complicated, messy, remarkable, inspiring, and impossible to understand by looking away.

Loving a country isn't the same as refusing to look at it. If anything, pretending the hard parts never happened is a far greater insult than putting them behind museum glass. You don't honor a nation by editing its memory. You honor it by trusting people to see the whole picture and decide, for themselves, what kind of future deserves to be built.

Mind the Gap

 

Every successful person is basically an iceberg in a designer suit. You get exposed to a sliver … just the surface: the title, the portfolio, the rehearsed introduction. You see the sum total of what they feel safe presenting.

What we see is the part they’ve learned to display. What we don’t see is the slog.

We don’t see the job they took because rent doesn’t barter with dreams. 

We don’t see the night everything fell apart and they kept going anyway, because the alternative felt like drowning in slow motion. 

We don’t see their losses … the ones that shrank them first, then, eventually, made room for something else to grow. 

We don’t see the  constellation of tiny, paper-thin, fleeting, easily missed wins that kept them from quitting.

Most people’s “overnight successes” are built from years of bleary predawn mornings, oddball mentors who showed up at the right hour, moments of luck that could’ve gone another way if the universe had sneezed, and the kind of stubbornness that borders on fictional.

When we encounter them out in the wild … shiny, confident, wearing accomplishment like a well-fitted sport coat … we forget all of that. We assume ease. We assume clarity. We assume they were born on third base and woke up already stretching for home.

This habit of seeing only the surface is potentially dangerous. It tricks us into comparing our internal draft pages with someone else’s final-print edition. You don’t see the similarities in your struggle, when you're only exposed to (or focus on) their highlight reel. And there’s no faster way to feel like you’re failing at a race you didn’t know you entered.

No one gets where they are by coasting. They get there by pushing through the molasses-thick patches of everyday life, by dragging yesterday’s version of themselves uphill until something finally gives. They get there through heartbreak, through dead ends, and by stubbornly pushing forward every time the universe said, “Nope, not now.”

So the next time you meet someone who seems impossibly put-together, remember this: There’s a whole basement beneath that living room. Being human is a long, winding apprenticeship. No one gets certified without bruises. No one grows wings without first lugging around some astonishingly heavy bones.

Don’t compare the tip of their iceberg to your total existence. It’s psychological self-torture … a recipe for misery that keeps you focused on what you don’t like about yourself and your life.