There’s a very specific person who comments on my LinkedIn posts.
They’ve got a professional headshot. Blue suit, grey background, arms folded. Their headline says something like “Senior Operations Manager | Process Excellence | Driving Results Through People.”
They’ve been at the same company for eleven years. They’re very serious about work.
And they absolutely do not understand that some people post on LinkedIn for fun.
I got a comment last week that said “This is highly unprofessional content for a business platform.”
I know. That’s the point.
But they can’t compute that. In their head, LinkedIn means personal branding, thought leadership, and posting about lessons learned from a difficult quarter. It means being serious. Saying the right things. Keeping your personality in a drawer until you’re safely off the platform.
The idea that someone might post jokes, on purpose, because they enjoy it, doesn’t fit the model.
So they assume I’m damaging my reputation. That I’m ruining my career. That somewhere there’s a client who’s going to see this and decide not to work with me.
Good. That’s the filter working.
I’ve had comments telling me to “focus on delivering value” under a post that got 2 million views. I failed English at school. Went to one of the worst schools in Britain. Nobody was preparing me for a career in anything. But 2 million people read something I wrote and apparently that doesn’t count because I wasn’t being professional when I did it.
No stakeholder alignment session. No sign-off from legal. Just a lad who learned that if you can make someone laugh, you can make them stop and listen.
I figured that out working as a charity fundraiser for Shelter in London. Standing on Oxford Street trying to get people to care about homelessness for thirty seconds. You learn very quickly that your opening line is everything. If you can’t make someone stop, nothing else matters. All the statistics and the impact reports and the serious important information means nothing if they’ve already walked past.
I used to watch the people in suits walk by. Earphones in, eyes fixed forward, determined not to engage. They had meetings to get to. Important ones. They didn’t have time for some bloke with a clipboard trying to be funny.
But every now and then, I’d get one of them to crack. Say something unexpected. Break the script. And they’d stop. Sometimes they’d sign up. Sometimes they’d just laugh and keep walking. But they stopped. That was the win.
Now LinkedIn is the street.
The cubicle people see someone enjoying themselves on a business platform and assume something’s gone wrong. They see jokes and think it must be a mistake. They see content that doesn’t look like a corporate announcement and wonder why nobody’s stopped me.
Nobody’s stopped me because there’s nothing to stop. I’m just a bloke who likes making people laugh. Sometimes that finds me work. Sometimes it just cheers someone up on a Tuesday morning. Both are fine.
“This won’t help your career.” It already has. The people I actually want to work with found me because of posts like this. The people who hate it were never going to hire me anyway.
“You’re damaging your professional reputation.” I don’t have a professional reputation. I have a reputation. This is it.
“What do your clients think?” The ones who get it, love it. The ones who don’t, don’t become clients. System working as intended.
They genuinely think everyone needs to perform professionalism online. That there’s one way to show up on the internet and anything else is career suicide.
Some of us don’t see it that way. Some of us figured out that being yourself online attracts the right people and repels the wrong ones, and both of those are useful.
I used humour to survive shit situations as a kid. It was a defence mechanism before it was anything else. Making people laugh meant making friends, avoiding trouble, getting through days that weren’t easy. I didn’t know it was useful. Just knew it worked.
And now it works here. On a platform full of people in suits telling me to be more professional.
The cubicle commenters want LinkedIn to stay serious. Professional. Appropriate. They want posts about leadership learnings and business insights and leveraging synergies for optimal outcomes.
They can have that. There’s millions of posts like that. Go read them. Nobody’s stopping you.
But some of us are going to keep posting jokes. Keep being unprofessional. Keep enjoying ourselves on a platform that was apparently only built for people who don’t.
Because that’s more fun.
And I’m allowed to have fun and so are you.
If you’ve got a version of yourself you keep hidden online because you’re not sure how it’ll go down, maybe stop doing that. Post the thing. Make the joke. Be the person you actually are instead of the professional version you think people want.
The right people will find you. The wrong ones will leave. Both of those are good outcomes.