Knowledge, upskilling, strong communication, and a good stack of soft skills; everyone talks about these as keys to career growth. And they’re right.
But there’s a very specific moment where all of that gets tested. It happens in a place many of us live in daily: LinkedIn, Slack, mailing lists, internal forums, you name it.
You’re scrolling, and you see a post or article that’s polished, clear, and seemingly correct in syntax and semantics. It sounds like it knows what it’s talking about.
And yet… it clashes with your empirical knowledge and established use cases.
You’ve done this in real life. You’ve run the networks, built the systems, lived through the incidents. Your first instinct is:
“This is wrong. This person is dreaming. Let me fix this.”
Your fingers hover over the keyboard. You’re ready to type a mini-thesis on why the author is mistaken, naïve, or oversimplifying. Bonus points for a bit of sarcasm, right?
That moment—right there—is where careers quietly diverge.
Some people fire off the reply. Others pause, zoom out, and treat this as a chance to learn, test their own thinking, and show up as adults in a professional community.
The difference between those two groups has a lot less to do with raw knowledge and a lot more to do with how they handle ideas that don’t fit their current worldview.
Let’s talk about that.