Midlife MavericksTwo days before the post went up, I was on a call with a large investor. I didn’t know how large until afterwards. One of those calls where the other person drops a detail casually and you think, wait, how much are you allocating?
After the call, I sat down and started mapping. If there are other firms doing this, who’s the right person at each one? Role XYZ at Firm A. Role XYZ at Firm B. Role XYZ at Firm C. I wrote it all down. I didn’t know any of them. They weren’t in my network. I was going to have to find someone to introduce me, the usual slow route: ask around, check LinkedIn, hope for a warm connection.
Two days later, I published the most terrified post I’ve ever written on LinkedIn.
I didn’t sit down and craft a polished take on hedge fund strategy. I sat down and wrote that I was terrified, that I’d just launched a newsletter about early-stage hedge fund investing, and that I thought maybe one or two people would sign up. I hit publish before I could talk myself out of it.
That post became my most viewed post on LinkedIn. Ever.
And then my inbox pinged. I looked at the name. Looked at the company. Looked at the role.
It was the person. Role XYZ. Firm B. The one I’d written down forty-eight hours earlier and had no idea how to reach. They’d read my post. They reached out to me.
I actually checked twice because I thought I’d misread it.
In the space of 24 hours, that single post brought meeting requests, podcast invitations, ideal clients asking what it would take to work together, hundreds of new followers, and 100 subscribers to the new newsletter. The newsletter I’d assumed nobody would care about.
I’m about to eat my words, and I want you to watch me do it.
Quote of the Week
I think very early on in life we all learn what we’re good at and what we’re not good at, and we stay where it’s safe.
Sara Blakely
The Scared Post Is the One That Works
I have spent the better part of 18 months telling you that social media is not the only way to build a business. That you can grow through referrals, warm introductions, your existing network. I stand by that. It’s true. But I was also using that truth as a comfortable hiding place, because putting my expertise in front of strangers felt exposed in a way that private networking never does.
What I wasn’t expecting is that the exposure is the point.
I didn’t post a confident breakdown of hedge fund strategy. I posted my fear. I said: I’m launching this and I have no idea if it’s any good. I said: who am I to write about this? I said: maybe one or two people will read it.
And people responded to that. Not because I demonstrated expertise. Because I demonstrated honesty about how terrifying it is to put expertise out there when you’re not sure you’re qualified enough, senior enough, bulletproof enough.
The polished version of that post, the one where I pretend I’m completely confident and this is just the next logical step in my career, would have died in the feed. The scared version was the one that made people stop scrolling.
What’s Really Stopping You
I know the fear because I am the fear.
Who am I to write about this? What if I get the numbers wrong? What if someone with more experience reads it and tears it apart? What if people think I don’t have enough years, enough credentials, enough authority to have an opinion?
I had all of those thoughts. Every single one. The morning I hit publish, my stomach was in knots.
But there’s a second layer underneath, and this is the one that keeps professional women quiet for years. It’s not just fear of being wrong. It’s fear of being seen as an attention seeker. The worry that colleagues will read your post and think you’re trying to be something you’re not. That your boss might wonder why you’re suddenly “building a profile” and assume you’re halfway out the door. That putting your name on a public opinion is somehow showing off, and showing off is something serious professional women do not do.
So you stay quiet. You keep your expertise in your head, in your meetings, in your one-to-one conversations with people who already know you.
And the people who need to find you… can’t.
The Real Business Happens in the DMs
Here’s what nobody told me about LinkedIn, and it changes everything about the fear.
The people who matter are not going to like your post. They are not going to leave a comment. Professional people, serious buyers, the kind of people you actually want to reach, they don’t engage publicly. The people who comment are mostly there to support you, and that’s lovely, but that’s not where the business is.
The business is in the DMs. Someone reads your post. They send a connection request. You accept. Then comes the message: “I’d like to meet.”
That was my experience. The investor at Firm B didn’t like my post. Didn’t comment. Didn’t share it. Just quietly reached out and asked for a conversation.
This means the thing you’re most afraid of, the public scrutiny, the visible judgment, barely exists. The audience that matters is watching silently and reaching out privately. LinkedIn, at the professional level, is not a performance. It’s a discovery tool. You put something out. The right people find it. And then the conversation moves behind closed doors, exactly where you’re comfortable.
I Am Not an Influencer. But I Did Stop Hiding.
I have to tell you something that made me physically cringe. One of the top allocations people at a major U.S. investment bank, one of the largest investors in the world, was introducing me to someone via email. In the introduction, he described me as “an influencer now.”
I am not an influencer. I hate video. I am not selling creams. I am not selling feed pictures. I am not going to dance on camera, point at floating text, or film my morning routine.
But he didn’t mean influencer the way I was hearing it. He meant: she has something to say, and people are paying attention. That part, I’ll take.
For those of us who grew up building networks at conferences and exchanging business cards over steak dinners, the idea that a stranger could find you through a scared LinkedIn post feels absurd. But the people on the other side of the table now, the ones making allocation decisions and hiring consultants and choosing who to partner with, many of them discover expertise by searching and reading. If you’re not there when they look, someone else is.
You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to become a content machine. But if you have 15 or 20 years of expertise sitting in your head and the only people who benefit from it are the ones already in your meetings, you are leaving a lot on the table.
Substack and LinkedIn: The Quiet Flywheel
A brief sidebar, because this surprised me.
Six weeks ago, I started publishing on Substack. Both Midlife Mavericks and my weekly column for Executiva, the Portuguese publication for corporate women, now live there alongside the new finance newsletter. As of this week, I have 2,500 subscribers across the platform. Not followers. Subscribers. People whose email addresses I have. An audience I own.
What I didn’t expect was how well Substack and LinkedIn feed each other. A post on LinkedIn drives people to Substack for the longer, deeper content. Substack readers find me on LinkedIn and engage there. The two platforms create a loop that builds on itself quietly.
Many of you reading this are already on Substack. If you’ve been thinking about LinkedIn but haven’t started, consider this: you already write, you already have opinions, and you already understand how an audience works. LinkedIn is just the discovery layer for the depth you’re already producing here.
OWN IT
I almost didn’t publish that post. I wrote it, read it back, and thought: this sounds desperate. This sounds like someone who doesn’t know what she’s doing asking the internet for permission.
I published it anyway. And the people who showed up in my inbox weren’t there because I sounded confident. They were there because I sounded real.
You have expertise. Years of it. Opinions forged through real decisions, real mistakes, real results. You’ve been keeping all of that inside meetings and private conversations because the alternative feels too exposed. But the person you’ve been trying to reach, the client, the collaborator, the investor, the partner, they’re already out there looking for someone who knows what you know. They just can’t find you yet. And remember: they’re not going to judge you in public. They’re going to message you in private.
So here’s your move this week. Open LinkedIn. Write one post. Say what area you work in, name the specific part of it you care about most, and tell people you’re going to start sharing your thoughts on it. Admit that your view is shaped by your own experience, your own bias, your own lens. That honesty is not a weakness. It’s what makes it worth reading.
If that feels like too much, start with something you’ve already done. The last conference you attended. The last conversation with a client that made you think. Write three paragraphs about what you actually took away from it. Not what’s safe. What you think.
The post doesn’t need to be perfect. Mine certainly wasn’t. Publish it anyway.
Hit reply and tell me: what would you write about if you stopped worrying about being judged?
See you next Wednesday, C
P.S. If you’re employed and thinking “my company wouldn’t love this,” you’re right to consider it. Vet what you share. But writing about your professional interests, your observations from events in your field, your perspective on trends you’re watching? Honestly, most employers benefit when their people are known for knowing their stuff. It reflects well on them too.
