Daily Practice – The Machines Are Coming For That Too

Friday, 9.44pm

Sheffield, U.K.

It’s a philosophy of life. A practice. If you do this, something will change, what will change is that you will change, your life will change, and if you can change you, you can perhaps change the world.

– Vivienne Westwood

I have been writing on LinkedIn every day for the last 140 days, thinking that it might help as I take a new business to market.

I’m not sure it’s working.

Here’s the problem – what do you put your effort into every single day to develop your practice?

There’s a choice – write for your own blog – which is what I was doing. Or write in a platform, which someone else owns.

The way that works for me is a routine – a consistent approach that I commit to every day.

That means writing 7 days a week. No excuses, no interruptions. If you stop, everything stops. And when you stop, it takes time to come back and start again.

But it’s hard to do that on a blog and on LinkedIn – writing once a day is hard enough. Writing twice is perhaps asking too much. Especially if there is more writing to do – such as working on a thesis or papers.

So I decided to prioritize LinkedIn for a while because it felt like the place I could connect with prospects and partners.

But, I think consistency is now a problematic thing.

It’s hard to tell the difference between someone that puts in the effort every day and a bot.

If people are using AI tools to write and publish then what they do looks very similar to someone who does it through discipline.

Or, to reverse it, consistent discipline now looks like you’re using a robot to do your work.

And that’s problematic. I’ve seen views go down massively on LinkedIn. I don’t want to jump and blame the algorithm but it’s one of three things:

1. It’s depressing reach so you reach for the boost button and pay more.
2. There’s more AI content but the same number of eyeballs, so mathematically everything gets lower views.
3. It thinks you’re a bot and so depresses your content.

There may be more options but I can’t think of any right now.

So, the logical thing to do is to change – stop being predictable to a machine that’s adjusting itself as it goes.

My primary writing space has to be this blog – it’s where I work out ideas and think through situations.

And I think LinkedIn has to be a more random thing. In fact, I’m thinking of having a random number generator, like between 1 and 7, and only posting on the days when it’s over 4 and over.

Will the algorithm reward such randomness as evidence of being human? I don’t know – but I do know that life is too short to try and work for an algorithm.

So if you’re subscribed, you will probably see more posts from me again.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh