The biggest problem with “thought leadership” on LinkedIn
Recently, I appeared on a podcast where I was asked: what’s wrong with thought leadership?
My response was that people don't want to spend time with their ideas, but they expect you to spend time with their ideas.
They don't want to spend time with the discomfort of forming an idea. But they still want to put it out there, and they want you to stop scrolling, click "more” on their post, watch their video, read thirty lines of text, and then hand over your trust, your time, and maybe even your money.
I spent eight years writing a novel that most people finish in about two weeks. I designed it that way: to be a thriller that moves fast. But I still spent eight years on something most people spend two weeks with. That's the bargain.
Now, I'm not saying you have to be James Baldwin or Ernest Hemingway or Tom Wolfe or Sally Rooney on LinkedIn. You don't have to pore over every idea and suffer.
But you do have to think long enough so that what you present is fully baked.
The discomfort of formation
Real thinking is uncomfortable. You start with something obvious — maybe a client insight, maybe a pattern you’ve noticed in your industry. But then you have to chase it down. You have to ask:
Is this actually true?
What’s the counterargument?
What am I missing?
Most people stop there. They don’t want to live in that discomfort. They take the first draft of a thought, feed it into ChatGPT, and hit “publish.” But that’s where all the value gets stripped out.
In journalism AND in fiction, the first draft is almost never what gets published. In newsrooms, you learn the discipline of staying with incomplete information, of following threads that might lead nowhere, of living in uncertainty until the truth surfaced. The same can be said for writing a novel: you have to stick with your story long enough so it shows you what it is.
That same muscles apply to writing you put on the internet: if you don’t stay with an idea long enough to go deeper, you’re not giving your audience anything that AI couldn’t spit out.
What staying with ideas looks like
When I work with founders, they almost always start with surface-level ideas. Generic “future of AI in enterprise software” type of stuff.
But when we slow down and stay with the thought, something else emerges. One client, for example, realized that what he was really seeing wasn’t “AI in enterprise software” — it was how AI was changing the relationship between technical and non-technical team members, in ways most companies weren’t ready for. That’s real insight. That’s what happens when you dig.
The raw material is in your life already. Look at the last three weeks on your Google Cal. Those investor pitches, team calls, customer conversations? There are sparks there. But you have to be intentional enough to sit with them.
The voice note strategy
Here’s a simple way to build the muscle: walk outside, hit record, and talk.
Most people do thirty seconds and quit. The real work starts at minute ten, when you’ve burned through the clichés and start to find the surprising connections. That’s when you’re figuring it out in real time — and that’s what makes it valuable to someone else.
Don’t confuse this with brain dumping. Pick one pattern, one trend, one conversation that stuck with you, and follow it. Ask yourself questions out loud. Let it get messy. That’s the process.
What happens in the room
Real thought leadership is rooted in what happens in the room.
Journalism taught me this: your job is to take people into spaces they don’t have access to — whether it’s an NBA locker room, a trade negotiation, or a startup board meeting. In business, you’re already in the room. The question is whether you’ll give people access to what you see there.
When you share how an investor reacted to your pitch, or what makes a customer light up when you explain your product, you’re not just posting — you’re letting people into a room they don’t usually get to enter. That’s the difference between generic “insight” and thought leadership that actually builds trust.
From journalism to thought leadership
The reason I see this so clearly is because of my own path.
I started as a sports blogger in New York during the financial crisis, hustled into USA Today, and then Boston Globe Media. I learned two non-negotiables: stick to the truth, and package it well enough for a busy person to stop and pay attention. Oversell and you kill credibility. Undersell and no one reads.
Then I got knocked out of journalism by a concussion. I couldn’t process the noise of a newsroom anymore. So I wrote a novel — eight years of staying with an idea about a fighter with brain trauma. It eventually got published, but in the meantime I needed to make a living.
That’s when I realized there was a business in applying the same discipline of journalism — staying with ideas, finding the story, packaging it — to founders and executives.
The compound effect of depth
When you do this long enough, something compounding happens. You start to see connections others miss. Insights that feel obvious to you are revelatory to your audience.
That’s the difference between content marketing and real thought leadership. One is a brochure in disguise. The other builds credibility, trust, and relationships, a.k.a. the things that actually move businesses forward.
The future of B2B marketing won’t be in polished company posts. It’ll be in people. But people only stand out if they’re willing to put in the work — the uncomfortable, uncertain, time-consuming work of actually thinking.
Your ideas are worth more than 30 seconds.
But you have to prove it to a very tough critic first: yourself.
