Of all the crazy things authors have ever written, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s idea that “there are no second acts in American lives” might be one of the most off the mark.
Honestly, just look on LinkedIn. I say this after reading about a new study in which economists tried to use LinkedIn to trace the history of the U.S. labor market over the past few years.
The problem they ran into is something I think most of us probably already realized: LinkedIn profiles aren’t a self-reported history of work experiences, so much as they’re a constantly revised “retcon,” redone over and over in many cases to present the best possible face to the world.
In “Time Travel on Professional Profiles” (great title, by the way), published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Nicholas Bloom and Gideon Moore of Stanford University and Lisa Simon and Caelan Wilkie-Rogers of Revelio Labs used a dataset of 29,448,462 LinkedIn profiles, and came up with a few key insights for our purposes:
First, they found that “19.7 percent of established U.S. LinkedIn users retroactively edit the title or description of a job they have already left.”
Next: “These ‘time-travel’ edits are closely tied to labor market transitions: around such edits, workers are much more likely to change employers as compared to later-editing users.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the specific changes suggest “workers’ beliefs about which skills are in demand. Retroactive edits show sharp post-2022 increases in AI-related language and recent reductions in work-from-home and DEI language.”
And “LLM-associated writing markers surge after ChatGPT, especially among less-educated groups and MBAs from lower-ranked programs.”
Let’s roll past the sick burn from Stanford professors talking about “lower-ranked MBAs” and instead get to the part of this newsletter where I come clean.
Because heck yes, I’ve gone back and edited and rewritten my LinkedIn profile.
Partly, it’s because the things I’m doing now—Life Story Magic, business consulting, and writing for places like Inc.com and of course Understandably—are very different from what I was doing when I first joined LinkedIn.
I don’t think that’s unfair, as long as it’s truthful. Honestly, I don’t even remember when I first joined LinkedIn.
Anyway, I acknowledge: When I first started thinking about this article, I assumed I’d be writing about LinkedIn changes as a cautionary tale.
Something like, “beware the too-on-the-nose job description from 2015,” or the profile suggesting that someone was thinking deeply about artificial intelligence during the Obama administration.
But as I think about this more, revisions might be more of a feature than a bug.
I believe it was Ernest Hemingway who famously wrote: “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
(Yes, I’m enjoying myself quoting both Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the same newsletter.)
Revisions—again, truthful revisions—suggest to me attention to detail and an ability to communicate and change with the times.
In fact, maybe be more wary of people whose profiles look less like a time machine and more like a time capsule.
We all get second acts—and thirds, and fourths, and fifths ones, too.
At least, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Other things worth knowing …
Yahoo News via AFP: Israeli opposition leaders called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unfit to serve after a bombshell report that the UAE had warned him before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Haaretz reported that UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan spoke to Netanyahu a week and a half before the attack and told him that Hamas was planning a major operation.
Futurism: A journalist has accused Cleveland.com — the online home of The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper — of publishing an article under her byline without her consent, knowledge, or approval. The article was generated by the “Cleveland.com Express Desk,” which “uses AI tools to assist in producing content.” Reporter Kaitlin Durbin said she’d been away on her honeymoon when her employer published the AI article under her name.
CNN via MSN: Thieves took less than five minutes to steal four paintings from the Renoir Museum in southern France on Tuesday, abandoning two as they fled. The two missing paintings are “Madame Colonna Romano,” worth 2 million euros ($2.32 million), and “Jeune femme au puits,” valued at 200,000 euros ($232,000).
NYT: A little over a month before Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison, she invited a camera crew into her rented Southern California home: Nathan Fielder, the absurdist comedian behind “Nathan for You,” and documentary director Lance Oppenheim. That decision turned into a three-year odyssey and a three-hour documentary called “You Can See Everything” that may upend the documentary genre itself. It premieres theatrically via A24 on October 16.
WSJ: Southwest Airlines is jumping into the airport lounge competition. Four initial lounges are being built, with the first slated to open in late 2027.
NYT: Every time you drive your car is now a chance to get famous. Dash cams were made for safety — but they’ve inadvertently created a whole new entertainment genre.
AP: Pretty much everyone on stage at the Metropolitan Opera must audition — even the snake who will briefly take center stage in an upcoming adaptation of a Mozart classic. In charge of deciding who gets the starring reptilian role is Zoe Ziegfeld, a carnival performer-turned-opera actor cast as the snake handler in the Met’s version of “Così fan tutte,” inspired by Coney Island in the 1950s.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!