There’s way too much content out there on the Internet today.

Correction: Too much unhelpful, "me-too" content that wastes everyone's time. 

Everyone is publishing similar content about the same things, pushing their own agendas, and trying to sell someone something.

It’s tiresome, boring, and readers have had enough of it.

At With Content, we want to change the way content is perceived.

We don’t believe in churning out bits of content that have obviously been thrown together as an afterthought or copy-pasted-rephrased.

We believe in meticulously crafting credible, authoritative longform content that your potential customers will actually love.

Over the years, we've partnered with industry leaders to do just that, including household names like Singtel, DBS, Grab, Randstad, and TÜV SÜD.

Let us help you become the go-to authority in your space with content: https://withcontent.co/ or daniel@withcontent.co

Daniel Tay

New year, new opportunity to join the best company on the planet (I'm biased of course):

Raising the bar for content marketing in Asia | Co-founder at With Content

I write powerful stories that turn audience curiosity into commitment for founders and consultants.

I’m the best relationship you’ll never mention in a meeting. 

Officially, I’m a copywriter and story strategist. In practice, I’m a ghostwriter who slips into different personas to make executives and industry leaders sound effortlessly sharp.

I read philosophy because I’m attracted to good minds, and because clear thinking is the foundation of persuasive writing. 

My job is to help you show off yours without ever sounding like you’re trying.

I have a mildly obsessive relationship with research and run multiple social pages purely to study how ideas behave inside the algorithm.

The goal is simple: I take chaotic, half-formed thoughts and refine them into strategic, memorable, and powerful messaging for your business.

I don’t bite, unless it’s a bad argument.

Curious? Drop into my DMs with a question and let’s see if we click.

Email: hi@pearlinglim.com

Pearling Lim

What if stability in business is a myth we tell ourselves to feel safe?

Most founders think they’re fighting competitors, bad hires, or market cycles.
They’re not.

They’re fighting ENTROPY.

Entropy explains why strong teams lose their edge, why cultures decay without a clear villain, and why companies that “did everything right” still fall apart. It exposes the biggest lie in business: the belief in a steady state.

We assume that once the right team is built, the product ships, or revenue stabilizes, the system should sustain itself.

It won’t.

In physics, any system drifts toward disorder unless energy is continuously added. Organizations are no different.

Leave a high-performing team alone long enough and it becomes average.
Leave a clean process alone and it turns into bureaucracy.

Toxic culture, declining innovation, and customer churn don’t require failure to occur. They happen automatically when energy stops flowing.

Stability is temporary.

So when leaders ask, “Why is my team losing focus?” they’re misdiagnosing the problem. Focus isn’t self-sustaining. Clarity only exists while it’s enforced. The moment pressure lifts, entropy takes over.

Founders resent the repetition: restating the vision, resetting standards, fixing things that “should already work.” They believe they should be past this phase.

There is no past this.

Maintaining order requires constant energy just to stay where you are. This is the Red Queen Effect: running as fast as you can to remain in the same place.

If your churn is low and your team is aligned, that isn’t luck. It’s active resistance against decay.

But entropy is only half the story.

The second illusion is fairness.

“We built the best product.”
“We worked harder.”
“So why are we losing?”

Because markets are selection mechanisms.

Gravity doesn’t care about intent. 
Step off a ledge and you fall. 
Markets don’t reward effort either. 
Miss product–market fit and you starve.

Many businesses fail because they wait for fairness to validate them. But goodness is not currency.

Integrity matters for meaning.
Survival requires adaptation.

This is the fork.

Rigid businesses try to predict the future.
Antifragile ones design systems that improve under stress.

When disruption hits (recession, scandal, technological shifts), the right question is “How do we bend while others break?”

Leadership, then, is the continuous injection of energy against entropy.

The CEO is not just a manager but a Chief Energy Officer: responsible for replenishing vision, resetting standards, and restoring momentum faster than decay erodes them.

Problems are not interruptions of the work.
They are the work.

If business feels hard, it’s because you’re attempting something unnatural: imposing order on a universe that prefers disorder.

Building truth-aligned influence for Industry Leaders. | Copywriter + Story Strategist

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What if I told you that people fail on LinkedIn because they speak the wrong language to the wrong nervous system?

If you want your content to land across ANY industry without dumbing it down or selling your soul, this is for you. 

The uncomfortable truth? 
Content doesn’t underperform because it’s “not valuable,” but rather underperforms because it ignores CONTEXT. 

Every industry reads through a different survival lens.

Different fears.
Different liabilities.
Different definitions of “credible.”

So instead of rewriting your ideas a hundred times, translate them once PROPERLY.

Use this 3-layer filter before you post anything.

Layer 1: Risk Tolerance

Low-risk industries (finance, healthcare, public sector) are allergic to recklessness.
They reward restraint.

High-risk industries (tech, marketing, startups) metabolize uncertainty faster.
They tolerate speculation, even EXPECT it. 

Same insight, filtered through different risk appetites and delivery expectations.


Layer 2: Proof Standard

Ask yourself what this audience accepts as “truth.”

Some are fine with a strong opinion.
Others want a case vignette.
Some need metrics.
Some need regulated, peer-reviewed, legally defensible evidence.

If your proof standard is lower than their tolerance, you look unserious.
If it’s higher, you look irrelevant.

This is where most “thought leaders” embarrass themselves.


Layer 3: Buying Committee

Are you speaking to a solo decision-maker
or a room full of procurement, compliance, legal, ops, and finance?

Solo buyers respond to clarity and conviction.
Committees respond to alignment and risk mitigation.

If multiple stakeholders need to say yes,
your content must pre-answer objections that aren’t even verbalized yet.

Only AFTER these three filters
do you choose the content shape.

Post.
Essay.
Carousel.
Data breakdown.
Narrative memo.
Quiet authority piece.

This understanding is about us being precise.

Same brain and ideas, yet different translation layer.

That’s how content travels across industries
without losing power (or credibility). 

Just remember:
Great content calibrates judgment before it drives action. Plus, if you look deeper, authenticity is industry-dependent. 

I unpack this framework fully in my newsletter, including industry-specific applications for LinkedIn 2026. Out at 7pm SGT! Subscribe to be the first to read www.storyempowers.com :) You won’t regret it!

[It’s OUT] Read → https://lnkd.in/gFVPe2Uq

Your “wasted” time is your biggest competitive advantage.

I was grabbing coffee with a friend the other day, and we got into a debate about my process.

I told him I spent nearly six hours yesterday doing nothing but reading articles and watching old interviews of a new client.

He looked at me like I was insane.
“Why? You have the transcripts. You can generate captions. Just feed it into an AI, get the summary, and write the post. You’re losing money working this slow.”

On paper, he’s right.
It was inefficient.
But I believe he’s wrong.

Why?
Because of the Peacock’s Tail.

In biology, this is called costly signaling.
A peacock grows a massive, heavy, colorful tail that makes it slower and easier for predators to catch.

It’s literally a handicap.
And that’s the point.

The bird is signaling:
“I am so fit, so capable, and so well-adapted that I can survive even with this absurd waste of energy.”

The social translation is this:
In 2026, efficiency is a cheap signal.

Anyone can generate a “good enough” post in 10 seconds.
Because it costs almost nothing to produce, it carries almost no meaning.

But my waste is not my value.
My JUDGEMENT is.

The time is just the visible cost that makes that judgment legible.

When I spend six hours researching for a two-minute read, I’m not trying to prove that I worked harder.

I’m doing the non-automatable work:
→ Sitting in contradiction
→ Noticing tone, cadence, and subtext
→ Tracking how a person’s ideas evolve across time
→ Separating what sounds clever from what’s strategically useful
→ Building coherence out of chaos

That’s the work the transcript, summary, and prompt don’t do.

The reason my ghostwriting works isn’t because I’m a better typist than a bot.

It’s because I’m willing to sit in ambiguity long enough to develop taste, framing, and strategic intent before turning anything into output.

That slowness is a visible evidence of judgment.

Yes, in some environments, speed is the signal.
In operations, logistics, engineering, and execution-heavy roles, efficiency still means competence.

But in saturated attention markets, speed is free.

Everyone is fast, optimized, and shipping.

So speed no longer signals quality, but sameness.

The real bottleneck now is sense-making,
Which takes time because taste, synthesis, and strategic clarity don’t compress cleanly.

Tools will keep getting better.
Summaries will get sharper.
Nuance will get cheaper.

Time is just the receipt.
So no, my waste is not my value.
My willingness to do non-automatable thinking is.

Shortcuts signal that you’re using the same tools as everyone else.

If you want to build authority and stand out:
→ Do the research that feels unnecessary
→ Sit with the messy ideas longer than is comfortable
→ Write the story that feels too personal to publish
→ Edit the video until it feels like art, not content

Judgment is the luxury. 

The time you “waste” is just how you show them you can afford it.

I started this year with a 72-hour fast and it turned into an expensive life & business lesson.

If you use resets to sharpen your thinking, this is for you.

New year.
Empty stomach.
High ambition.

By the second day, I was staring at a spreadsheet with an unsettling level of confidence.

3 looked like 8.
1 looked like 11.
Silence looked like market validation.

My mind said:
“This is alignment.”

What made that moment dangerous wasn’t the fast.
It was WHEN I decided the numbers meant something.

Because when you strip away stimulation (food, routine, noise), the mind become hungry for coherence.

It wants the story to close.

In business, this shows up during:
→  resets
→  pivots
→  early traction reads
→  investor silence
→  post-burnout “clarity”

Ambiguity feels unsafe.
Neutral data feels like rejection.
Waiting feels like failure.

So the brain does what it’s designed to do:
it manufactures meaning to restore control.

This is where many smart decisions quietly break.

Meaning arrives BEFORE evidence.
Certainty shows up BEFORE understanding.

It looks sophisticated from the cover. 

Suddenly:
→ A small sample becomes a growth signal
→ Silence becomes strategy
→ Fatigue becomes transformation
→ Desire becomes insight

None of this is foolish.
It’s deeply human.

January is full of intelligent operators making beautiful mistakes because they confuse emotional intensity with truth.

The deeper lesson for me?
It was about timing interpretation.

Good judgment isn’t just WHAT you read from a signal,  it’s WHEN you allow yourself to read it.

Clarity that appears at the peak of deprivation, urgency, or excitement is usually unstable.

Real clarity survives three tests:

→ Time
→ Repetition
→ Boredom

If an idea still makes sense:
→ when your body is regulated
→ when the excitement has worn off
→ when you’re no longer trying to prove anything
that’s information you can trust.

This is why mature operators don’t rush conclusions during resets.

They reset the body first.
Then they wait.

They let numbers settle.
They let emotions normalize.
They let patterns repeat without narration.

Only then do they decide.

That restraint is a business skill.

A real reset doesn’t make everything feel meaningful.

It makes you harder to impress, harder to rush, and harder to fool, especially by yourself.

P.S. What decision in your business would benefit from waiting for one more repetition before you call it “clear”?

In 2025, I took four long breaks from LinkedIn, each lasting 4–6 weeks, and it was one of the best decisions I made all year.

Here’s why.

Stepping away gave me my mind back.

1/ I stopped outsourcing my judgment

LinkedIn isn’t neutral.
It quietly trains you to think impressively instead of clearly.

When you’re inside it every day:
→ You shape ideas around what gets applause
→ You compress thoughts before they’re ready
→ You confuse engagement with truth

Before the breaks, I’d catch myself editing ideas while thinking them.

I’d discard lines of thought because they wouldn’t land.

After a few weeks offline, that reflex disappeared.

My thoughts no longer needed an audience to proceed. I regained epistemic sovereignty.

This mattered even more because I’m also writing for my clients. 

When you write on behalf of others, the pressure to perform compounds.
You’re not just translating ideas, you’re pre-optimizing someone else’s voice for reaction.

If you’re always plugged in, that performance logic leaks upstream.
You start shaping their thinking before it’s finished.
Eventually, you do the same to your own.

Distance breaks that loop.

2/ I broke the feedback–identity loop

On LinkedIn, identity slowly bends toward reaction:
→ “This performed well → I should do more of this”
→ “This didn’t → maybe I’m off”

As a writer, I feel this secondhand, but constantly: screenshots, metrics, “what landed,” “what didn’t.”

During the breaks, there was nothing to metabolize of my own.

My nervous system downshifted.

I stopped adjusting who I was becoming based on what traveled farthest. I deconditioned.

3/ I rebuilt my relationship with creation

I started thinking to understand again

I wrote pages no client would ever see.
I followed ideas past usefulness.
I let thoughts stay unshaped longer.

That changed:
→ what I noticed
→ what I rejected
→ what I was willing to stand behind

My question shifted, “Will this work?” → “Is this true?”

That’s why the breaks mattered.

Because constant presence, especially when you think for others, was costing me something more valuable than reach:

MY ORIGINAL SIGNAL. 

Once you feel the difference between thinking for an audience and thinking for yourself, you don’t want to be always-on again.

Do you want clarity, or do you want control?

Life is paradoxical by nature.
Business is built the same way.
So is social media, visibility, and decision-making under pressure.

The problem is applying linear thinking to non-linear systems.

As responsibility grows, 
Reality stops behaving like a checklist.

 remember staring at a “proven” 12-month strategic roadmap, knowing deep down it was already obsolete the moment I hit save.

Why? Because..
More data doesn’t simplify choices.
More experience doesn’t remove tension.
More exposure doesn’t stabilize outcomes.

It multiplies variables.

At a certain level, 
Cause and effect stop being obvious.
Effort and reward decouple.
Timing outweighs technique.
Judgment matters more than formulas.

Most people never stop to ask themselves “What kind of system am I operating in?”

Which is one of the most important questions as non-linear environments reward adaptability, pattern recognition, and internal coherence.

In complex systems, progress is mostly about orientation.

You orient yourself by:
→  Reading feedback loops instead of chasing outcomes
→  Making reversible decisions early and irreversible ones slowly
→  Prioritizing signal over noise, even when metrics disagree

Think of it like flying rather than driving.

You adjust altitude.
You respond to conditions.
Movement happens through continuous correction. 

In business, this means:
→  Strategy is a living process
→  Consistency serves coherence
→  Authority comes from decision quality

In social media, this means:
→  Resonance matters more than reach
→  Timing shapes impact more than effort
→  Silence can be strategic when attention is saturated

In life, this means:
→  Stability is built internally, instead of it being extracted from circumstances
→  Alignment precedes explanation
→  Maturity is the ability to move without guarantees

The work, then, is expanding your capacity to operate inside it.

Capacity to hold tension without rushing resolution.
Capacity to decide with partial information.
Capacity to remain grounded while outcomes stay fluid.

This is what replaces control.

Your competence in complexity.

P.S. When no one can guarantee results anymore, what gives you leverage?

“I’m serving a niche market. What’s the easiest way to grow my LinkedIn & get clients?”

is one of the most common questions I hear on LinkedIn calls, and, in my experience, it’s a red flag.

Why?

Because in a niche market, “easy growth” is often a leading indicator that you’re about to sabotage your business model.

I’m not trying to be mean or provocative.
I say this as someone who spent the past year taking over multiple accounts that chased shortcuts first and paid for it later.

Here are three mechanisms that explain why.

1/ The Sorting Mechanism (Platform Reality)

The algorithm is a pattern-matching engine.

It rewards categorizability.
→ Repetition signals relevance.
→ Too much novelty signals confusion.

The fastest way to grow a niche account is not having more ideas.
It’s having fewer ideas, repeated until both the platform and the market can label you instantly.

If a stranger can’t finish this sentence, your growth is leaking:
“Follow them if you specifically need help with ____.”


2/ The Conversion Mechanism (Business Reality)

Growth without commercial intent creates zombie audiences.

High numbers.
Zero pulse.

Every post you write is doing one of two things:
→ Strengthening a buying decision
→ Or diluting it

Niche brands scale by pre-selling the same specific problem again and again.


3/ The Debt Mechanism (Cost Reality)

Shortcuts don’t remove work.
They DEFER it with interest.

When you hack growth without a solid foundation, you accumulate brand debt:
→ An audience you have to constantly re-educate
→ Leads that require excessive convincing
→ Sales that depend on volume instead of reputation

The bill always comes due.
Usually as a painful rebrand one or two years later.


Believe it or not,
if you serve a niche market, your goal isn’t virality.

It’s unmistakable signal.

One problem.
One buyer.
One dominant message.

Because in niche markets,
efficiency beats reach.

P.S. If shortcuts actually worked, everyone would take them. The fact that they don’t is the lesson. Don’t you think so?

P.P.S. If you serve a niche and already have traction, DM me the one problem you want to dominate. If it’s a fit, I’ll share how I’d think about strengthening your position.

You’re not being evaluated online the way you think you are.

Sometimes you’re being evaluated for the same competence through a completely different lens.

That lens decides whether your confidence reads as leadership or “tone.”

Whether your clarity reads as expertise or “attitude.”

Whether your boundaries read as professionalism or “coldness.”

Once you see that lens, you stop trying to “improve your content” in the wrong direction.

You start designing authority like a strategist:
→  signal the right proof, at the right moment
→  reduce misinterpretation
→  build trust without shrinking
→  protect your energy from bad-faith engagement

I mapped the patterns I keep observing, how authority gets granted online, and why the playbook often can’t be identical.

If you’re building a serious brand, this will change how you write, how you position, and what you stop explaining.

Read in full ↓

Online Authority isn’t Gender-Neutral

I spoke to a very interesting lady earlier today.
She hired a virtual assistant to apply for jobs on her behalf.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Why? because of what it reveals about how she thinks.

She didn’t treat job applications as a moral ritual you must personally suffer through,  rather she treated it as a mechanical process that exists to create access.

She separated the admin work from the actual outcome.

The outcome was exposure to better rooms, higher-paying roles, and different timelines.

So she paid to buy surface area in opportunity space.

To me, she’s taking it further than job hunting,  she’s option buying.

She invested money into increasing the probability that a better version of her life would happen.

That’s why I find her interesting.

Because most people only invest in things that already have proof.

She invested in a future version of herself that doesn’t exist yet, and funded the logistics needed to get there.

She treated her future self like a startup and financed its distribution channel.

She decided her time and nervous system were worth more than the friction of rejection cycles and administrative grind.

She refused unnecessary suffering.

What actually caught my attention wasn’t the tactic, but the internal permission behind it.

To hire someone to apply for you requires a specific type of ego:
1. You must believe your time is literally too valuable for data entry, so that energy is better spent on strategy and preparation.

2. You must believe you are a product worth marketing aggressively, ensuring you are ready for the right opportunity when it comes.

It’s the systems-level thinking to treat life as a portfolio.

The willingness to architect probability instead of waiting for luck.
That’s a different operating system.

It made me realize why this story stayed with me.

I’m not impressed by her outsourcing job applications.

But super impressed by the identity that sees leverage before effort, structure before struggle, and outcomes before rituals.

She was funding her future.
That’s why I think she’s interesting.

Because you don’t see that many people who are willing to invest in a better timeline.

taplio

The Battle

Daniel Tay

Pearling Lim

Followers

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Performance ScoreDaniel Tay's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScorePearling Lim's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Daniel Tay

Pearling Lim

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Daniel Tay's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScorePearling Lim's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDaniel Tay's LinkedIn Performance