Unreasonable choices that build the right life
Justin Welsh's essay on being "unreasonable" is a useful frame for operators who keep choosing the path that looks wrong to everyone else.
Welsh's argument is that "reasonable" choices (the safe job, the predictable path, the content strategy that copies whoever is winning right now) optimize for external approval, not internal coherence. Operators who build real inbound do the opposite.
Welsh's essay argues that the choices which look wrong from the outside are often the ones that produce lives that feel right. On LinkedIn, that translates to a specific pattern: pick a lane that fits how you actually think, hold it past the point where most people would pivot, and let compounding do what short-term tactics never can. That is the unreasonable choice Welsh is pointing at, and it has a practical shape.
What Welsh actually said
The essay is short. Welsh's argument runs roughly like this: society hands you a script, and following the script feels reasonable because everyone around you is following it too. The people who end up doing work they care about and who attract the kind of clients they want are the ones who chose something that looked unreasonable at the time.
LinkedIn has its own version of that script. The advice is not wrong, but it is written for average outcomes.
The three unreasonable choices that show up most
When we look across the profiles generating consistent inbound, three patterns keep appearing. None of them are what LinkedIn advice usually recommends.
Staying narrow past the point of comfort. Most operators broaden when growth is slow. They figure a wider topic will reach more people. The operators who compound tend to narrow instead, as the Justin Welsh LinkedIn strategy audit shows. His audience grew when he got more specific, not less.
That narrowing looks unreasonable in month two. By month eight, it is the whole business.
Writing for one person, not the algorithm. The operators building the most useful comment sections are not writing for reach. They are writing for the specific person who has the specific problem they solve. The posts tend to be longer than best practice suggests, more direct than the hook-framework-CTA template allows, and less concerned with engagement bait. They underperform on raw impressions and overperform on inbound conversations.
Engaging instead of posting. This is the one that makes the least sense to most people. You are supposed to post. That is what building a LinkedIn presence means. Except the founder-led brands LinkedIn inbound data suggests that strategic comment-section presence, engaging consistently on posts your buyers are already reading, compounds faster for most operators than a posting volume play.
Choosing to engage over post is unreasonable in a world where "content strategy" means publishing. It is very reasonable in a world where the goal is inbound conversations.
Why these choices feel wrong
Welsh's essay is good on the psychological mechanics. The reasonable path has social proof. When you follow the script, you can point to everyone else who is following the same script. When you deviate, you are making a bet that your read on your own situation is better than the consensus read.
That is uncomfortable.
The operators who push through that window tend to have a specific advantage: they are not measuring against external benchmarks. They are measuring against their own pipeline data. Inbound conversations, not follower counts. Replies from people who fit their buyer profile, not aggregate likes.
That reframe is what makes the unreasonable choice survivable. If the goal is reach, narrow positioning and comment-section focus look like failures. If the goal is qualified inbound, they often look like the only strategy that was working the whole time.
The compounding that makes it work
The deviation from the playbook is where compounding enters, because you are building something that fits how you actually think and who your buyers actually are. That fit produces content that resonates with the right people, comments that land, relationships that convert. The inbound builds on itself.
The goal gradient hypothesis applied to LinkedIn covers part of this: how proximity to a visible goal changes behavior. The operators who stick with an unreasonable choice long enough to see it work do something similar. They find a closer goal marker that tells them the compounding has started, even before the aggregate numbers are impressive. One inbound conversation from the right person. One comment thread that turns into a call.
That signal is what makes the next month of unreasonable choices bearable.
What this means if you are three months in and flat
If your LinkedIn presence is flat and you are considering broadening your topic, increasing your posting volume, or pivoting to a format that is working for someone else, pause on that.
The question Welsh would ask is: is the thing you are doing actually yours, or is it a reasonable approximation of what you thought you were supposed to do?
Most operators who are flat at three months are not doing too much of the wrong thing. They are doing a halfway version of the right thing. Broad enough to feel safe. Narrow enough to feel specific. Not quite either.
The unreasonable move is to go all the way in one direction. Pick the niche that feels too small. Write the post that is 200 words longer than the style guide says. Spend 45 minutes in comment sections instead of writing another post.
None of those choices look like a strategy. Over eight months, they tend to look like the strategy that worked.
Frequently asked
In Welsh's framing, an unreasonable choice is one that deviates from the consensus playbook in a way that fits your actual situation. On LinkedIn, that usually means narrowing your niche past the point where it feels safe, writing for a specific buyer instead of broad reach, or prioritizing engagement over posting volume. These choices look wrong from the outside and tend to compound over time.
