Big Brains. Tiny Squares

There are women wandering around with fifteen or twenty years of stellar experience behind them. Some come from the corporate world. Others have spent that time mastering a particular craft, or building a body of work.

Either way, they know their shit.

As one client always puts it: “I’ve forgotten more than most people know.”

And still, they’re spending actual brainpower working out how to make everything they know easy to understand and palatable in a series of teeny, tiny Instagram squares.

It’s a tough call when the three-word inspirational quote written over a picture of a sunrise “wins”, while your carefully constructed TED Talk on the impact of the patriarchy on female power dies a slow death.

The conclusion comes quickly. I’m too much. Too complex. Too boring. People aren’t interested. Nobody needs what I’m selling.

If you spent the pandemic years watching women build freedom-based empires online, you may still be convinced there is a code to crack. The correct format, framework or content pillar that will finally make the algorithm recognise your brilliance.

But the danger isn’t simply that Instagram is a bit rubbish at communicating the full depth of someone’s thinking. It’s that, over time, we begin adapting the thinking itself to fit the platform.

CLARITY ISN’T THE PROBLEM

This isn’t an argument for making your ideas needlessly complicated. Being difficult to understand is not proof of intellectual depth.

Clarity is generous. It helps people enter your thinking, understand why it matters and decide whether they want to hear more.

But clarity is not the same as flattening.

Do you know what’s really chic right now?

Knowing so much about what you do, and having ideas so expansive, that they couldn’t possibly be contained inside a nifty little Instagram framework.

People are finally beginning to question the credentials of those cosplaying expertise on the internet. This should be a brilliant moment for people with genuine experience, original thinking and something consequential to say.

But if you want to be seen differently from the cosplayers, the last thing you should do is behave like one.

INSTAGRAM IS A HELLSCAPE. BEHAVE ACCORDINGLY

The attention economy is in full swing on Instagram. Many of us already see it as a bad habit to be broken: the thing stealing our time, attention and remaining ability to complete a thought.

If you’re using it to build your brand, know that your carefully considered thinking is being wedged between miniature pony memes, videos of Trump, war and destruction, and an algorithmically defined swirl of competing sales messages.

You liked one fibre supplement last month. Here are six more.

What I would actively hate for you is to stop following an interesting thread because it won’t perform, then repeat a recognisable opinion because it will. To begin viewing every experience as potential content and every idea through the lens of whether it can become a Reel.

Eventually, your brain becomes platform-shaped.

YOU’RE BUILDING A BRAND, NOT A GRID

Instagram, LinkedIn, podcasts, speaking engagements and rooms full of actual people are all platforms. None of them is a brand strategy.

You can leave Instagram if you hate it. You can stay if it remains useful. That’s a question of personal preference, audience and commercial intent.

My ask is simply this: stop expecting Instagram to contain you.

Use the grid for fragments, provocations and doorways into a much larger body of work. Let the full thinking live in essays, films, conversations, podcasts, rooms, stages, intellectual property and experiences.

Build an owned world around your expertise instead of mistaking one distribution channel for the world itself.

Your job is not to make your brain fit inside the square. It’s to build a world large enough to hold it, then use the square as a door.