Maybe one frame is through taking control of your own personal development and learning: after all “learning is the one thing your employer can’t take away from you”

Over the years we’ve seen the rise of bro-etry and cringe “thought leadership” and crying CEOs. When I scroll my feed I have to sidestep the clearly threadboi and #personalbrand engagement-farming posts and try and focus on the real content.

Networking is useful, but distasteful to many. Instead, participating in self-directed learning communities is networking

“Don’t become a marketing manager, become someone who knows how to run user research”

Describe things that someone can explain to someone else, or you'll miss out on word-of-mouth growth. Imagine you wandered into some party and met an investor/donor/customer named Emily. Even if you're the most persuasive person ever and she walks away from the conversation energized and excited, your time is wasted because Emily can't explain to her coworkers/friends/legislative-body what specifically she's excited about.

If Emily is a potential customer and all she heard was nothing-language, then you've gained no information. She might be interested! But that interest might only be in something she's imagined — not what you're actually making.

Nothing-language is describing your product as "an investigation into how we generate dispersed intimacy, signify alliance, and physical representations of our digital coordination praxis"1 instead of saying you're an investment fund. If you're going to "revolutionize", "create the operating system for", "build at the intersection between", "empower", "democratize", "individually flourish", or "be interdisciplinary", the universe should pause, rewind, and let you explain again. It's kind and wants you to succeed.

Be boring. Say you're "plaid for messaging apps" or "a figma plugin that generates svg icons from gpt-3" or "chrome extension that adds cmd-k to every website".