Talk Like Ethan Mollick, Matey

For a long time, I took traditional advice on how to post on LinkedIn. I’d summarize it as:

Lots of emojis!!! 🚀🔥💡✨🎯 Lots of hashtags!!!!!

I finally realized this advice was terrible. Who do I know on LinkedIn whose posts are both successful and good? I landed on Ethan Mollick, whose opinions on AI I have long valued. His plainspoken and informative writing (no emojis, no hashtags) gets a lot of attention on LinkedIn. Mostly because he’s good and well-known, but also because the posts don’t scream “junkbait!”

I do all my own writing, with the exception of using the AI for first drafts of social media posts condensed from my longer blog-newsletter essays.

I also automate any chore I can using AI, using agent tools like Cursor Rules and more recently Claude Agent Skills. So I wrote a Skill to train Claude on how to create LinkedIn posts in the style of plainspoken Ethan Mollick. Besides its main SKILL.md file with guidelines on how to condense a long post into an interesting LinkedIn version, the Skill includes style-guide.md with four examples of Mollick’s LinkedIn posts and why I liked them.

AI is good for more than “talk like a pirate, matey!”