The Overachiever’s Guide is a monthly column dedicated to excellence and accomplishment in all aspects of life in Singapore. Whether it’s essential life skills or questionable life choices, we help you to stay ahead of the bell curve.
Previously, we gave you a guide to becoming a relatable GE2025 candidate. Now, we bring you a guide to being a thought leader on LinkedIn without activating Premium.
Top image: Stephanie Lee / RICE file photo
Step 1: Fake Titles
On LinkedIn, no one is just one thing.
After all, why be one thing when you can lie about everything?
Those hyphens in your profile? They’re your horcruxes.
The more you have, the greater your power, the closer to immortality.
Why settle for writer when you can be brand storyteller | comms slut | wordswhore | co-founder | ex-Meta | fractional web3 content consultant.
Why be a technician when you can try for technical manager | woman in tech | Scrum accredited project lead | solutions guru | ex-salesforce | ex-Pornhub.
Remember that a person’s worth is measured by the hyphens in his title.
The more fictitious titles you accumulate, the higher your chances of imaginary success.
Step 2: Fake Experiences
I once met a journalist who chose death over clickbait.
Her name?
I can’t remember.
Gotcha.
Here’s the truth you don’t want to hear.
So many people on LinkedIn worry about honesty.
But the only ROI on honesty—is obscurity.
You can’t make it because you won’t fake it.
And if you won’t fake it, I can’t help it.
So stop typing facts and let your delulu do the talking.
On LinkedIn, you can get fired in the morning.
Get US$300 million in Series A funding by lunchtime.
Lose it all by dinner because a Capybara ate your IP.
Only to have your company saved by a Djinn who may or may not be a CEO on vacation in Bali.
Who had planned the whole thing as a test.
Which I passed, with flying colours.
Today, I’m not just the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
I also have 13,000 followers on LinkedIn.
Step 3: Fake Engagement
Do you ever wonder how millions of the most boring slop known to humanity manages to trend on LinkedIn?
The answer is simple: Engagement pods.
Closed groups where users agree to like, comment and share each other’s posts.
No matter how banal, irrelevant or psychotic.
In the real world, you would be publicly stoned for sharing painfully aspirational anecdotes.
In the engagement pod, your words will be applauded as scripture and proselytised to other faithful followers, who are locked into engagement pods of their own—a perfect masturbatory ouroboros of insincerity.
Cynical voices will call this a circlejerk.
I call it an artificially-enhanced feedback loop.
Step 4: Fake Crisis
Here’s why you’re getting left behind on LinkedIn.
You’re trying to sell a product,
when you should be trying to sell a crisis.
Good LinkedIn clout-farmers know this.
Trump knows this.
Your mother knows this.
It’s not about how good your content is.
It’s about how insecure and unhappy you can make them feel.
AI is taking their jobs and sleeping with their partners.
But you can save them because you’ve managed to make AI work for you.
X industry is collapsing, and soon everyone will be begging for spare change.
Unless they learn to follow your lead and pivot to Y.
Over 15 years, you’ve seen companies make this one simple mistake again and again.
Donate $150,000 to caymanbanker@ricemedia.co to learn what it is.
Step 5: Fake Meta Wisdom
If all else fails, the best course of action is to go meta.
Instead of breaking your back aurafarming on the LinkedIn clout paddies, write some pseudo-intellectual bullshit to show your superiority to those Premium-account peasants and their teeny gold boxes.
After all, LinkedIn is just another iteration of platform capitalism—that same which has, in recent years, devoured dating life (Hinge), taxis (any ride-hailing app), small local food businesses (any food delivery app), social life (IG/TikTok) or intimacy (Onlyfans).
In the name of shareholder value, platform capitalism has optimised and flattened every meaningful human interaction into an algorithmically-mediated performance—of the self, of authenticity, of learned experience, of humility, of joy, of profound pain transmuted into bite-sized wisdom nuggets.
It’s a process which reduces life to bullet points, the same way love today has been reduced to a checklist of multicoloured flags.
In this never-ending arms race, it’s not enough to be genuine. You must constantly discover and weaponise new forms of humanity to grow your ‘personal brand’. How sustainable this strip-mining is depends on the person. How viable in the long term as a way of engaging with other human beings, we really don’t know.
The best course of action is, of course, to resist the forces that make LinkedIn, LinkedIn. Unfortunately, this requires the privilege of economic security that few of us possess and a collective action that even fewer have the energy for. Until then, all we have are small acts of resistance—the raised fist of unfollowed influencers and forgotten notifications.
For more insights like this, download my free LinkedIn resistance toolkit 
