I posted on LinkedIn last month. One of those posts. You know the kind. A story about building products, framed just right, with a lesson at the end. It did well. People liked it. People shared it. Recruiters reached out. The algorithm rewarded me for performing the exact version of myself that LinkedIn wants: competent, reflective, forward-looking, humbly accomplished. I'm not complaining. The post was true. Every word of it. But it wasn't the whole truth, and the distance between the two is where I actually live.

Here are the things I can't put on LinkedIn.

The doubt

I can't put on LinkedIn that some mornings I wake up and genuinely don't know if what I'm doing is brave or stupid. That the line between "visionary career move" and "bloke who can't get a job so he makes websites" is entirely a matter of perspective, and the perspective shifts depending on whether it's 10am or 3am. That my wife has never once questioned what I'm doing, which is generous and loving and also means I have no external brake on the days when I should probably just apply for a normal job and stop building my fourteenth product.

LinkedIn doesn't have a reaction button for "I'm terrified and excited in equal measure." It should. That would be the most honest button on the entire platform. I'd press it on half the posts I see from other people who are clearly feeling the same thing but have wrapped it in the language of intentional career design. We are all out here pretending the uncertainty is a feature. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just uncertainty.

LinkedIn doesn't have a reaction button for "I'm terrified and excited in equal measure." It should. That would be the most honest button on the entire platform.

The hours

I can't put on LinkedIn that I built Oishii London at 11pm on a Tuesday because I couldn't sleep and the alternative was lying in bed staring at the ceiling thinking about whether I should have taken that recruiter call more seriously. That the Forest flash cards app exists because my son asked me a question about Nottingham Forest and I thought, well, instead of answering it, what if I built an entire product around it? That half of my products were born from insomnia and the other half from procrastinating on the one thing I should actually be doing, which is applying for jobs.

The LinkedIn version of this is "I'm passionate about building." The real version is that building is what I do instead of worrying. It's a coping mechanism that happens to produce useful things. When the anxiety about the future gets too loud, I open the laptop and make something. The making quiets the noise. The deployed URL is proof that the evening wasn't wasted, even if the underlying motivation was closer to panic than passion.

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The real productivity hack: Anxiety, channelled into a terminal window after the kid goes to bed, produces approximately one shippable product per week. No morning routine required.

The skills that don't fit a CV

I can't put on LinkedIn that my most valuable professional skill is taste. Not "strategic thinking" or "stakeholder management" or any of the other phrases that populate the skills section of every strategy director's profile. Taste. The ability to look at something and know whether it's right. To feel, almost physically, when a design is off by ten percent. To understand why one restaurant recommendation lands and another doesn't, why one colour palette feels premium and another feels cheap, why one product name sticks and another slides off your brain. This skill has no certification. There is no LinkedIn endorsement for it. And yet it's the thing that makes everything I build feel like it was made by someone who gives a damn.

I can't put on LinkedIn that I'm a world-class sender of links. That my friends have a running joke about it. That I send more "you need to see this" messages per week than most people send in a year. That this compulsion to connect people with things - an article, a restaurant, an album, a product - is not a personality quirk but a fundamental orientation toward the world that directly explains why I build recommendation products. The algorithm inside my brain has been running for decades. I just finally gave it a URL.

I can't put on LinkedIn that I don't drink coffee. That the entire productivity-hustle aesthetic of the modern professional - the pour-over, the espresso machine, the "but first, coffee" mug - has nothing to do with me. I drink hot chocolate. I build products on hot chocolate. I don't know what that says about me professionally but I suspect it says more than my skills section does.

The fear

I can't put on LinkedIn that I'm forty and that the number matters to me more than I'd like. That advertising is an industry that worships youth and I've spent the last five years feeling the weight of that worship. That every time I see a "30 Under 30" list, a small voice in my head says: you're not under anything anymore. That the products I build are partly a response to this fear - a way of proving that relevance isn't a function of age, that the best work can come from someone with grey in their beard and references that predate TikTok.

I can't put on LinkedIn that the dream employer - the Nike, the Spotify, the LEGO - feels simultaneously within reach and impossibly far away. That I can see exactly how my skills would fit, exactly what I'd bring, exactly why they'd want someone who understands both brand strategy and product building. And that this clarity of vision makes the gap between here and there feel more painful, not less. Knowing what you want and not having it is worse than not knowing. At least the confused people don't know what they're missing.

The LinkedIn version of me is a highlight reel. The real version is a man at a kitchen table in North London at 11pm, building something he hopes will matter, drinking hot chocolate because coffee makes him feel ill. Both versions are true. One of them is interesting.

The performance

Here is what I've learned about LinkedIn, and by extension about the way we present ourselves professionally: the performance is not the problem. The performance is fine. Everyone knows it's a performance. Your recruiter knows. Your connections know. The person who liked your post at 7am while sitting on the toilet knows. The performance is an agreed-upon fiction that allows professionals to communicate without the crippling vulnerability of total honesty.

The problem is when you start believing the performance is all there is. When the gap between the LinkedIn version and the real version gets so wide that you forget which one is actually you. When "thrilled to announce" becomes a substitute for the complicated truth of "relieved and scared and hopeful and not entirely sure this was the right decision."

So here is the complicated truth. I'm between things. I'm building because I can't not build. I'm good at this in ways that don't fit neatly into a job description. I'm scared that the work won't lead anywhere. I'm convinced that it will. I'm forty years old and I'm just getting started. I drink hot chocolate. I can't sleep. I ship things at midnight. None of this belongs on LinkedIn. All of it belongs here.