The Streetlight Paradox: Why I Write Where My Message is Least Welcome

A friend recently asked me why I persist with writing my Delta Mind newsletter on LinkedIn when the platform feels like the exact antithesis of what I write about. "Wouldn't you find better platforms where your ideas resonate more naturally?" he wondered.

His question reminded me of a story I heard as a child. An old woman was searching for something on the street as dusk approached. Passersby offered to help and asked where she had last seen what she was looking for. She replied that she had dropped it at home, inside her hut. People were aghast. "Then why are you looking on the street?" they asked. "Because there's more light here," she explained.

The traditional interpretation of this parable teaches us to stop searching for peace and contentment outside when it lies within us. But I offered my friend a different reading: instead of looking where it's easier to find what we're searching for, we should bring our message to where it's most needed - even if that's the harder path.

The Anti-Segmentation Strategy

This approach violates every principle of smart marketing I practice in my professional life. In marketing, we identify our ideal audience - those most likely to engage, convert, and advocate for our message. We segment ruthlessly, targeting people who are already primed to receive what we're offering.

But with Delta Mind, I'm doing the opposite. I'm deliberately choosing the audience least likely to immediately resonate with my message because that's where the highest leverage lies. LinkedIn's culture of performative professionalism, productivity optimization, and hustle narratives is precisely why these ideas need to be planted here.

It's like choosing to plant seeds in rocky soil because that's where growth is most needed, rather than in the already fertile ground where everything easily takes root.

The Metrics That Don't Matter

The results speak to this strategy's quiet power. While my posts receive few likes and limited engagement, I consistently see new subscribers. People might not publicly engage with content that challenges their assumptions about success, purpose, and professional life, but they're quietly subscribing because something in them recognizes the truth of what I'm saying.

My job isn't to convince people of something foreign to them - it's to trigger what's latent. LinkedIn's audience, surrounded by conventional professional wisdom, is hungry for authentic reflection, even if they can't publicly acknowledge it in the same way they would a post about productivity hacks.

Those silent subscribers are my real audience: people questioning the conventional wisdom about success and purpose who need someone to articulate what they're already sensing but can't quite name.

The Freedom of Different Scorecards

This approach is only possible because I don't measure success by the platform's established metrics. The moment you stop tracking likes, shares, and conversion rates as your primary indicators, you suddenly have the freedom to do things that would look like "bad strategy" to anyone playing the conventional game.

This buffer is everything. It allows me to write something that gets one like but reaches the one person who needed to hear it and changes their entire approach to their career. It gives me the patience to plant seeds that might not sprout for months or years, rather than constantly pivoting based on what got engagement last week.

Most creators become prisoners of their own metrics, optimizing for what gets rewarded rather than what creates the impact they originally wanted. But when you define success differently from the outset, you're not constantly second-guessing yourself every time the algorithm doesn't favor your content.

The Alphabet Principle

As I told my friend, you don't start teaching the alphabet to adults just because they pay attention when the children who can't read, need it most. The adults might applaud your teaching, give you positive feedback, and make you feel like an effective educator. But the real work - the work that matters - happens when you choose to work with those who struggle with the basics, who resist the lesson, who need it most.

LinkedIn is full of professionals who appear to have it all figured out, but many are struggling with deeper questions about meaning, purpose, and what success actually means. They need different perspectives, not more of the same optimized content that tells them what they want to hear.

When Seeds Find Each Other

Something unexpected has started happening. The people who've been quietly subscribing, who've been questioning their assumptions in private, are beginning to find each other. They're reaching out, sharing their own experiments in thinking differently, testing new frameworks in their organizations.

What started as individual questioning is becoming something collective. These aren't people looking for another productivity hack or career optimization strategy. They're individuals ready to prototype entirely different approaches to work, success, and meaning.

I'm starting to see the formation of what I can only describe as cultural pilots - people embedded in traditional systems but secretly running experiments with post-scarcity thinking. They're changing KPIs, restructuring team dynamics, questioning the fundamental assumptions their organizations operate on.

The Critical Mass Principle

This is where the real leverage lies. When enough people in LinkedIn's professional ecosystem start questioning conventional wisdom about productivity, success, and purpose, it could fundamentally alter the conversation in that space.

One person changing their mind in a book club is personal growth. One person changing their mind in a corporate environment could influence teams, decisions, entire organizational cultures. But fifty people changing their minds simultaneously, across different organizations, different industries, different levels of hierarchy - that's cultural shift.

These dispersed questioners are becoming something more organized, more intentional. They're not just consuming different ideas; they're implementing them, testing them, proving them in the real world.

Why This Matters

The most important conversations often happen in the most unlikely places. The people who need to hear your message most are rarely the ones already gathered in spaces designed for that message.

If you have something meaningful to say, ask yourself: where would these ideas create the most positive disruption? Where are people trapped in thinking that no longer serves them? Where could your perspective unlock possibilities that people haven't even considered?

That's where your message belongs - not where it will be most comfortable, but where it will do the most good.

The Light That Spreads

The Streetlight Paradox isn't just about choosing to search where the light is needed most. It's about what happens when you realize that the people you're trying to reach are already carrying their own light - they just didn't know they were allowed to turn it on.

My role isn't to illuminate the darkness for them. It's to give them permission to use the light they already have. And when enough people start doing that, when enough individual lights start shining in the same ecosystem, something remarkable happens.

The darkness doesn't just get illuminated. It gets transformed.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is search for your purpose not under the streetlight where it's easy to see, but in the places where the light is needed most. And sometimes, the most revolutionary act is helping others realize they've been carrying lanterns all along.