In March 2023, I was forced to quit my first corporate job out of college. At the time, it felt like an interruption to a story I had assumed would unfold in a reasonably linear fashion. For most of my life, progress had appeared to follow a fairly coherent sequence: study, graduate, find work, gain experience, advance. The sudden collapse of that sequence forced me into an uncomfortable confrontation with uncertainty.
What I did not realize then was that uncertainty is often where the most consequential forms of growth begin. Around that time, I started posting on LinkedIn. I posted because I was trying to think. Writing in public forces vague intuitions into coherent arguments and private observations into shared inquiry. It requires us to discover what we actually believe rather than what we merely repeat.
And I found my people. I found an extraordinary community of marketers, founders, creatives, recruiters, entrepreneurs, students, and professionals who were far more generous than the internet is often given credit for being. Conversations turned into opportunities. Opportunities turned into freelance clients. Freelance clients turned into a sustainable income.
Within a relatively short period, I found myself building a business almost accidentally. At the same time, I became a devoted follower of what might be called the LinkedIn orthodoxy. I posted consistently. I networked aggressively. I responded to every single message. I commented on other creators’ posts religiously. I treated visibility as a discipline. Like many people who discover early success on a platform, I began believing that the system itself deserved most of the credit.
If I followed the rules, good things happened. Therefore, I assumed the rules were indispensable.
Then I moved from India to the United Kingdom to pursue my master’s degree at the University of Bristol. Almost immediately, my life changed. Until then, adulthood had largely existed in theory. I had responsibilities, of course, but I also had something I had taken for granted for most of my life: a family that absorbed a thousand small burdens on my behalf. Paperwork somehow got done. Meals appeared. Laundry was folded. Problems were often solved before they had the chance to become mine. Suddenly, I was on my own.
Every form needed to be understood. Every administrative hurdle needed to be navigated. Every meal had to be planned, bought, cooked, and cleaned up afterward. Laundry no longer disappeared into a magical system and returned neatly folded. There wasn’t anyone to drive me places. A broken appliance, a confusing immigration document, or a missed bus route all became my responsibility to figure out.
None of these tasks were extraordinary. They were simply the ordinary mechanics of adult life. Yet for a twenty-two-year-old who had been admittedly, somewhat pampered, they represented a profound shift in how I moved through the world.
My days became fuller in ways that had nothing to do with content or personal branding. I was learning how to run a life before I could think about optimizing one. By the time lectures, assignments, volunteer roles, friendships, and the general unpredictability of living in a new country were added to the equation, I simply didn’t have the capacity to spend hours on LinkedIn the way I once had.
Looking back, I think that was probably healthy. My attention was no longer concentrated on building a professional identity but was being redirected toward building a person.
Because I was on a student visa, freelancing was no longer an option. The online identity I had spent months constructing suddenly became less central than the entirely new reality unfolding around me. Now don’t get me wrong. I was excited to start a new chapter in a new country. But, I was worried.
The modern internet has trained creators to view momentum as something fragile. We are encouraged to believe that attention must be constantly fed, maintained and optimized. There is an underlying anxiety embedded within creator culture that suggests relevance is perpetually on the verge of expiring. The assumption is simple. Stop posting and people will forget you. Disappear for long enough and you cease to exist.
The problem with this philosophy is that it mistakes activity for value. As the months passed, I found myself spending less time building an audience and more time building a life. I joined a drama production. I recited poetry at university events. I attended presentations and talks that had nothing to do with my degree simply because they sounded interesting. I joined societies, explored new interests, travelled, interned, and spent long evenings talking to people whose experiences challenged my assumptions about the world. The remarkable thing about that year is that very little of it would have appeared productive through the lens of LinkedIn branding.
My engagement declined. My output declined. My networking declined. My growth slowed. And yet something far more important was happening. I was accumulating substance. Looking back, I think we dramatically underestimate the role that lived experience plays in intellectual and professional development. The internet encourages production. Life supplies material. One without the other eventually becomes hollow.
A creator who never leaves the platform often ends up producing increasingly sophisticated variations of the same thought. A creator who periodically disappears into the world returns with entirely new thoughts. During that year, I broke almost every rule I had once considered sacred.
Nothing catastrophic happened. My audience did not evaporate. My reputation did not collapse. People continued finding my work. Followers continued arriving. Opportunities continued emerging. What surprised me most was discovering that a personal brand possesses a certain inertia. Once people have developed an impression of you, that impression does not vanish because you missed a few months of posting.
Human memory does not operate according to content calendars. People remember perspectives. They remember originality. They remember the feeling of encountering an interesting mind. Several people at university recognized me from LinkedIn. I still remember how surreal that felt. I was living in another country, operating within entirely different social circles, and yet the digital reputation I had built had somehow travelled ahead of me.
It was the first time I truly understood what a personal brand actually is. A personal brand is accumulated trust at scale. It is the residue left behind after hundreds of interactions, ideas, conversations, and impressions. The posts themselves are temporary. The perception they create is not. That realization became even clearer when opportunities began arriving that seemed only indirectly connected to LinkedIn. I was invited to give a TEDx talk. I appeared on a podcast. I helped build AIESEC in Bristol from the ground up. After graduating, I shifted much of my attention toward YouTube and grew a channel to more than 13,000 subscribers and millions of views within a year. At first glance, these accomplishments appear disconnected. In reality, they were manifestations of the same phenomenon. Trust compounds.
The most valuable outcomes of personal branding rarely occur on the platform where the brand was built. They emerge elsewhere. A recommendation. An introduction. An invitation. A conversation. An opportunity.
To top it all off, I never niched down. I’ve always been drawn to creativity in all its forms, and my interests tend to evolve as I do. Following my curiosity has always felt more natural than confining myself to a single lane, which is a personal branding crime.
The internet tends to focus obsessively on metrics because metrics are visible. What it struggles to measure are the second-order effects of credibility. Credibility enters rooms before you do. It introduces you to people you have never met. It creates opportunities that cannot be attributed to a single post, a single strategy, or a single moment. By the time those opportunities become visible, the causal chain that created them is often impossible to trace. Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly skeptical of rigid advice about personal branding.
Most of it confuses means with ends. The objective is becoming the sort of person whose ideas are worth paying attention to. That requires something more difficult than consistency. It requires depth. Depth cannot be manufactured through content systems. Depth emerges from experience, curiosity, experimentation, failure, conversation, risk, travel, creativity, and sustained engagement with the world beyond our screens.
Today, I am back home and investing far more time into LinkedIn again. I am building The Internet’s Favourite and approaching content creation with renewed energy. The difference is that I no longer believe my life should revolve around maintaining an algorithm’s attention. Quite the opposite. I suspect the healthiest approach is to build a life so expansive that social media becomes one expression of it rather than its centre.
For years, I thought my growth came from following the rules. In retrospect, the most important thing I ever did was eventually stop organizing my life around them. The periods when I was least focused on growing my personal brand were the periods that gave me the experiences, perspective, and credibility that strengthened it the most. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your online presence is close the laptop, walk into the world, and return with something worth saying.
So, that’s all for today. I see you checking out the share button (Do it. Do it. Do iiiiiiit.)
May the algorithm be ever in your favour.
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