Don't copy what works.

// The Problem

The temptation is always real.

This week, I've had a post go 'viral' on Linkedin - 20,000 impressions, 200 likes and more than 100 comments - it's way outside of my normal range of what I get on my posts. It's a true outlier in terms of performance.

My normal posts get less than 20-30 likes and the impressions are in the low 100's but this post just took off. Now, it didn't take off immediately - in fact, for the first hour, it got no engagement whatsoever. The Linkedin gods will tell you that if a post doesn't have traction in the first hour, it normally dies but this one was different.

After an hour - just one person had liked it. Then... it happened. A steady trickle of likes, comments and interactions. These likes and comments weren't coming from my standard first connections but they were flowing in from people I didn't know.

The topic? A.I.

I had hopped on the bandwagon and rebadged/repurposed my article from last week about using A.I to create a framework and I posted the realisation that I came to - that those people who write with A.I are like middle lane hoggers on the motorway.

What I didn't know is that currently, there seems to be a wave of content on Linkedin where this is the topic - a rallying cry around human content and stuff that's authentic.. (whatever that is).

The point is - I now feel like I've jumped on a bandwagon - like I've gone searching for something I could replicate and then repurposed it for my own 'vitality' but that's not true, I genuinely just thought of something on the fly and wrote it down... I think I wrote it on the morning commute for something to do.

And it went crazy.

// The Temptation

The problem with having a 'viral' hit - is that you want to reproduce it because it drags in profile viewers, you get the lovely adrenaline rush and the achey thumbs as you respond to comment after comment (not all complimentary I might add) and you want to keep that interaction going but now, it's dying off.. the post is still getting likes but not at the rate it was last Thursday.

I could now go searching for something else to write about, to copy.. to replicate. The genuine urge to have the same style of post is there and I guess that if I look at others who have viral posts or high performing posts - I too want the same.

When I grew my Instagram to several thousand followers and I 'gamed' the system by indicating to Instagram that I was hyper active on the account, responding to EVERY comment, EVERY DM and commenting on other peoples posts - I did that because I wanted to be like other people I followed.

It's funny - when you see someone having success with a particular method or a particular way of doing something, the inner voice in all of us tells us to copy that because we'll have the same success.

We all say to ourselves in words that sound like "You don't need to re-invent the wheel" - we all try and think that the best way to success is through a shortcut - we're all seduced by following success and what's worked before.

// The Truth

The ugly truth of 'copying what works' is not the lust for success - it's the fear of wasting time.

The fact that those have come before you, tried it, tested it and found the formula - that's a shortcut to allow yourself to not waste effort on finding your own way.

You're scared of standing alone and standing apart from others and saying - no, I'm going to do it this way because the seduction of something that 'seems' to work is so strong. The fact that you're standing apart and doing something differently is risky - it means that you might need to be original.

Originality doesn't always convert to success and we have to face that head on.

If it doesn't succeed and it means you have to re-iterate, try again and make changes - it's effort but I want to say that this is where you're going to make the best work.

I drove to see my mum last week and drove through my home town and described to my kids the library (which is still there, we drove past it) and the fact that every Saturday morning, I would cycle to the library to change the book I was reading and go into the little side room where all the encyclopaedias were kept so that I could look at things which interested me - no Google, no ChatGPT and no algorithms. It was pure unadulterated research into topics I was interested in.

I wasn't being fed fake news (unless they'd written it in a book, that's always a possibility) - I was finding things out for myself, finding my own news sources and getting interested in things because I wanted to learn about them.

The problem with getting information at your fingertips is that we can't always guarantee the accuracy and if our kids are being fed things that aren't true, the narrative and history changes.

Being fast and doing the same things as others is not always the right path - finding things out for yourself and understanding what works and what doesn't is what makes life interesting right?

// The Loss

Think about it - if you copy what works from someone else (and plenty of people copied my Instagram carousels when I made them) - you lose a part of yourself. You lose a bit of your voice and your conviction in your work.

You're effectively taking the credit and the hard earned work of others, replicating it and then hoping it works (because it worked for them) and when it doesn't succeed (because you don't now know why it doesn't) - you're back at the start, looking for something else to copy.

Those that have tried, failed and tried again - they've built up a long term identity of trying to succeed, people understand that they're constantly experimenting and getting to grips with their content, output, processes - whatever it is - they have experimented, they've learned from their failures (and they don't repeat them) and they know what they should try next.

// The Choice

Here’s the part I’m trying to understand after the post went big this week because it was definitely bigger than usual and way bigger than I expected.

For a few days, I felt taller - I thought I was Gary Vee and I'd nailed the algorithm - I was a social media expert because of it.

Yes, I've got more profile views, random connection requests and it’s hard not to enjoy that but I'm understanding that the real test isn’t how you feel when something works - it’s what you do next because now I have data and an understanding of what works - it was a quick analogy which has cut through but the 100's of posts before that mean I also know what doesn't work - it's not a torrent of success.

So the question isn’t whether I can repeat it because of course I can - that'd be the rinse and repeat.

The question is whether I should.