3 ways to lift your visibility

For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.

In today’s email:

• 3 ways to lift your visibility

• Crisp > wordy

• Avoid falling into rabbit holes

• Disrupt doomscrolling

• Reid Hoffman as career coach

ON YOUR CAREER

3 ways to lift your visibility

Visibility management is promoting our insights, accomplishments, and the value we can deliver. Visibility within our organization helps us be promoted and paid well. External visibility builds our network. Here are 3 ways to lift our visibility:

1. Public speaking

Presenting at conferences, industry events, and universities boosts visibility. Beforehand, email the event organizer 3 to 5 points that will help them introduce you. If you arrive early, and stay after your presentation, there will be additional opportunities to connect with people.

2. Publishing

Writing for industry magazines, newspapers, and social media provide excellent opportunities to build your profile. This could be an original piece. Or the summary of the work of others. Whilst being a though leader can be difficult, being a thought curator is possible for all of us.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a useful site to publish our thoughts. It’s also a platform to publicly record our career history, accomplishments, and academic credentials. It’s a living CV. With additional social proof coming from our endorsements and comments.

I frequently share more useful tips like these on LinkedIn — feel free to follow me here.

COMMUNICATION

Crisp > wordy

School teachers reward students with higher grades when they display a large vocabulary. At university, academic language becomes more technical and less comprehensible to the general reader. In business, we want to de-complicate our writing. We want it to be clear, confident, and efficient — crisp. Our readers appreciate when we remove unnecessary words and use plain language. Simplicity is generosity. And it increases reader engagement.

PRODUCTIVITY

Avoid falling into rabbit holes

For this week’s fifth article, I started searching on ‘Reid Hoffman‘ which then led to ‘AI investments‘ and on to ‘tech dystopianism versus utopianism’. Down another rabbit hole of the Internet. All very interesting, but a productivity killer.

We are curious and enjoy learning. And our online searches at work are best focused on the information we need to complete projects. Interesting diversions can be saved and consumed in our leisure time. This stops us falling into rabbit holes.

1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS

Disrupt doomscrolling

Doomscrolling is when we scroll through negative online posts, stories, and videos for hours. It leads to rabbit holes filled by anxiety. Algorithms sustain the flow of negativity. Doomscrolling is addictive because it releases dopamine in our brain.

We can disrupt doomscrolling. When we are online for leisure, we can choose to consume calmer and happier content. Oxytocin replaces dopamine. We can retrieve the interesting diversions we saved in our work day. Or we can put our devices away and go analogue — hanging out with friends or getting into nature.

GET SMARTER

Reid Hoffman as career coach

Reid Hoffman (1967 - ) is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of LinkedIn which has 1 billion users across 200 countries. He serves on the board of Microsoft which purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. Hoffman had completed a Bachelor of Science (Stanford) and Masters in Philosophy (Oxford), then worked at Apple, Fujitsu, and PayPal. He continues a long, successful career as a venture capitalist e.g. Facebook and AirBnB and was a founding investor in Open AI. Hoffman describes himself as ‘a tech optimist, not a tech utopian.’ Some of Hoffman’s wisdom: