Beware of LinkedIn Envy

I recently updated my LinkedIn profile. When I visited the public URL to see how it looked, I saw a cluster of stiffly-smiling human faces under the worst possible heading: ”People Similar to Adam”.

I’m fairly certain I’m totally unique and special and there’s definitely no one similar to me, so I investigated further. That made it worse.

One Similar to Adam had gone to Harvard and has a senior marketing title at a Series B start-up. Another Similar to Adam was from my analyst class and just founded a well-funded start-up. The Similars to Adam were really what I’d call similar-ish, but with one key difference: they were more successful. (What made LinkedIn consider them similar to me? Shared connections).

One of the first things you learn when you start to work in Hollywood is to ignore the trades, because news of that stupid idiot who sold that stupid idiot alien screenplay to Sony for a stupid million idiot dollars will infuriate you and kill a whole afternoon of work.

But that infuriating feeling extends to any industry where you are pummeled with information about those doing better than you. This is dangerous for everyone, but as I go through a program with 50 career switchers spending half their day on LinkedIn, I’ve realized it’s especially harmful for them.

The danger of catching LinkedIn envy isn’t only the seething jealousy (a broader symptom of the vanity and posturing inherent in social media), but something bigger: it encourages you to mimic. It’s easy to focus on the LinkedIn profile of someone with the title you want and try to work backwards. We do this because we tend to think of career paths as these rigid, climbable hills. But this ignores the fact that life is actually pretty haphazard, and these days it’s more about grabbing evaporating opportunities than following constructed paths.

This is particularly true in the startup world, where a company can grow from 10 to 100 in a year, and suddenly your Marketing Intern is a Marketing Coordinator and suddenly again he’s the VP of Marketing.

It does happen in the corporate world too. A friend of mine at a rigid, old school media company started at the bottom of the marketing department and two years later is heading strategy for the entire division, a position usually occupied by MBAs many years senior.

Personally, the greatest opportunities I’ve embraced are ones I stumbled upon accidentally. The worst, the ones I pursued when I tried to calculate what I should do to get where I want to be. Every path is different, and the best planning can’t predict the real opportunities, which come from being at the unforeseeable intersection of talent, ambition and luck at the right time.

So when you next go down your next LinkedIn rabbit hole, get out before you catch a case of LinkedIn envy that will end up dictating your next move. If you do that, the best you can be is similar to someone else.

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