Oh no! Tim’s written another LinkedIn article
LinkedIn. Full of Poseurs.
So, I’ll be welcoming some of you here from LinkedIn. Your first visit probably. Welcome.
Pat yourself on the back; you are the curious, the trendsetters, the pressers of random hyperlinks. Well, enter of your own choice, hand in your prejudices along with your coats, disrobe yourself of received wisdom and take a glass of my Voltaire cocktail (a little rum, a little vermouth, a dash of old fashioned free speech). There’s space down there on the carpet at the front with the other children. Our lecture is about to begin.
So, history… Again. Maybe I have delighted you long enough? I should let some of the other ladies have a go? No? Okay, history it is then.
In a recent LinkedIn article I distilled the whole of human history down to seven life lessons. As you do. Like some fucking middle management Yoda with a penchant for Suetonius, I draw my unwilling readers in like that goddamn tractor beam in Star Wars. Yeah, from the first movie, in the original trilogy. The good ones. And now, like the Millennium Falcon, you are held captive on my Death Star along with the regular crowd of ardent readers; potential girlfriends checking me out, Mick Taylor fans, Indonesians bizarrely looking for Thai massage service in London, ex-girlfriends stalking me, that sad nutter from some basement in Didcot. My readers, in fact.
Lesson 6: Storytelling. Or Something.
Let me quote from the article to give those of you who didn’t read it a flavour. Life lesson number six which - I think anyway - is one of the best:-
We are the stories we tell.
For several years I’ve been working on a riff about people being the stories that they tell. Of course, I probably stole the idea from a hundred different places. But I believe it. Nothing summarises a person (a nation, a culture) more than the stories they tell about themselves. Think about it. When you tell a story about yourself to friends or colleagues, how do you cast yourself? Hero? Villain? Put upon martyr? Joker? It doesn’t take a Freud to notice this.
Socrates does not sleep easy tonight because I think I gave the old pederast an intellectual kicking. Yeah.
Urban Philosopher with Jokes
How much intellectual hubris did it take to write this article and publish it to the world? How pretentious was I to put it on LinkedIn? Let me just consult my digital meter. OMG! The needle is pointing to ‘head firmly up arse and modelling it as a rather fashionable hat’ pretentious. That’s how much. With a feather.
Of course I quoted Ecclesiastes and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. What again? Regular readers here will know they are the only two books I’ve ever pretended to have read. I’m a poor man’s philosophe. But in the kingdom of the blind, the man with two trip wires tends to come out on top.
But all the same, I’m kind of liking the feeling of being some sort of rando dispensing unearned wisdom while cracking poor jokes. The cap fits and I’m snapping that brim smartly. I mean, hasn’t everything I’ve been writing here on this website been comedic philosophy? Bon mots, bon-bons, bonfire of the vanities?
Yes, yes it has Tim.
Well anyway, welcome, bookmark the blog. It’s a journey we’re all on children, a little wisdom and humility and ridiculousness will go a long way.
“I am, I said.” says Neil Diamond. “And no one heard. Not even the chair.”
All about that. Thank you Neil.
Quotidian Notes & Required Reading
This blog was written in 2018 following a rather pretentious LinkedIn article I put out into the world. Hilariously called Seven Lessons from History it attempts to shoehorn thousands of years into 1000 words. Must have been pissed. Least I had the good sense to call myself out for being a total nob.
Yes, I’ve lightly re-edited this blog with the benefit of experience and a world weary sigh in October 2026. You know adding those little tricks and nudges our SEO / GEO overlords demand. The money’s at the end of the bed Tim. Thirty pieces of silver wasn’t it?
It needed an overhaul. Squarespace gave it the catchy URL of: https://timrobson.uk/blog/2018/11/22/r64ad6ziqb6fyxap0j5u5uv0sgoi5b - what a fucking joke. Thanks guys. Amended now.
My LinkedIn / Blog crossover didn’t stop here. Oh no! Tim occasionally steps out into the LinkedIn world to dispense pearls of wisdom to the business swine. Try my thoughts on my thoughts of The Rise of Data Centres. More a page turner than you’d have thought. Essential in fact. Serious writer am I.
Or fuck it! Why not read about when I met Madonna or my views on Prague? Random is the new rock ‘n’ roll.
