There is a particular kind of LinkedIn post that begins with a delayed flight and ends with a theory of leadership.
The author was stranded at Gate 17. His laptop battery had fallen to 8 percent. A child nearby was crying. Then, while watching a weary airline employee rearrange the boarding line, he suddenly understood what separates leaders from managers. Six paragraphs later, the missed connection has become a moral pilgrimage. The airline employee has been drafted into the story without compensation.
Something happened, presumably. Yet the event we are reading has passed through a literary machine. Inconvenience became adversity. Adversity became discovery. Discovery became content. By the time the post reaches us, the author is no longer a regional sales director waiting for a flight to Cincinnati. He is Odysseus lashed to the mast.
Miguel de Cervantes knew the type.
The Gentleman Who Rewrote His Life
At the beginning of Don Quixote, Alonso Quixano is an obscure country gentleman with an ordinary estate and far too much time for reading. He consumes so many romances of chivalry that their conventions begin to replace his understanding of reality.
In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.
Quixano does more than lose his judgment. He acquires a genre.
He decides that he is Don Quixote de la Mancha, a wandering knight destined to defend maidens, defeat giants, and win eternal fame. His skinny horse becomes the noble Rocinante. A neighboring farm girl becomes Dulcinea del Toboso, the peerless lady of his devotion. An inn becomes a castle because a knight requires castles, while a roadside building with cheap beds would contribute very little to the legend.
This resembles the peculiar literary atmosphere of LinkedIn. Ordinary professional life appears too shapeless to present without ornament. People answer emails, update spreadsheets, sit through meetings, and occasionally receive promotions. Such activities pay mortgages, which is a respectable accomplishment. They rarely produce epics.
The aspiring thought leader must therefore perform the Quixotic operation. He selects a genre and forces his working life inside it.
Every Windmill Is a Leadership Challenge
Don Quixote’s most famous error occurs when he encounters windmills and interprets them as giants.
“Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay.”
Sancho tells him they are windmills. Don Quixote dismisses this as cowardice and attacks. The sail catches his lance, breaks it, and throws both knight and horse across the ground.
The LinkedIn version usually hurts less, though the prose can leave bruises. A routine setback becomes “the moment everything changed.” A manager’s correction becomes a lesson in resilience. Being rejected for a job becomes proof that destiny had prepared a grander assignment. Even resignation is staged as a royal abdication: “After seven amazing years, I have decided to step away from my role.”
Step away is a lovely phrase. Medieval kings step away. Account executives usually quit.
The deeper resemblance lies in the refusal to let events retain their natural size. Don Quixote cannot meet a windmill because a windmill offers him no role worth playing. He needs a giant so that he may become a giant-slayer. The professional storyteller faces the same temptation. A delayed flight must become a trial because ordinary annoyance supplies no halo.
The Helmet of Mambrino
Later, Don Quixote sees a barber wearing a brass basin on his head as protection from the rain. He declares that it is the legendary helmet of Mambrino.
“That is the helmet of Mambrino,” said Don Quixote; “stand aside and leave me to deal with him, and thou shalt see how, without saying a word, I shall bring this adventure to an issue and possess myself of the helmet I have so longed for.”
The barber flees. Don Quixote claims the basin and wears it as a helmet. Its missing visor puzzles him, but he soon invents an explanation. Some previous owner must have melted the visor down for money.
This is one of Cervantes’s sharpest observations. Once a person’s identity depends upon an interpretation, contrary evidence becomes raw material for another interpretation.
The same process appears when every professional experience must confirm the author’s preferred identity. If a project succeeds, it proves his leadership. If it fails, it proves his courage. If colleagues praise him, they recognize his gifts. If they criticize him, they fear his candor. The basin always becomes a helmet. The only question is how much explanatory metal must be hammered around it.
A professional identity built this way soon becomes impossible to correct. Reality may object, but reality has poor engagement numbers.
Famous in His Own Lifetime
Don Quixote’s longing for adventure is inseparable from his longing to be recorded. He wants his deeds preserved by historians and repeated by future generations. When he learns that a book about his adventures has appeared, he is delighted.
“One of the things that ought to give most pleasure to a virtuous and eminent man is to find himself in his lifetime in print and in type, familiar in people’s mouths with a good name.”
LinkedIn has placed this pleasure within reach of everyone. A person can become his own knight, herald, court poet, and royal historian before breakfast. He performs the deed, interprets its significance, publishes the authorized account, and watches acquaintances applaud below it.
This produces an odd reversal. Experience once preceded narration. Now experience is often evaluated according to whether it can become narration. A conference, promotion, layoff, or encounter with a thoughtful janitor acquires value as possible material. Life becomes the quarry from which the personal brand cuts monuments to itself.
Don Quixote at least had the courtesy to employ an imaginary historian.
The Cost of Living as a Character
Cervantes does not ask us to despise Don Quixote. The knight is vain, absurd, brave, generous, and strangely magnificent. His fantasy lets him see moral possibilities that saner people overlook. Yet it also prevents him from seeing actual people. Shepherds, innkeepers, prisoners, barbers, and farm girls are repeatedly forced into roles inside his private romance.
That is the danger of professional self-mythology. The writer slowly stops encountering colleagues as persons. They become supporting characters in the story of his growth. The intern supplies a lesson about mentorship. The difficult boss supplies a lesson about boundaries. The dismissed employee supplies a lesson about corporate courage. Everyone receives a role; only the author gets a name.
Near the opening of the novel, Cervantes explains the fatal decision:
He determined to turn knight-errant and travel through the world with horse and armour in quest of adventures, and to practise all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant.
The modern equivalent is quieter. A person decides to travel through professional life in quest of content, practicing everything he has seen successful thought leaders practice. He discovers that a personal brand can provide coherence, recognition, and occasionally employment. Then the brand begins demanding sacrifices. Every failure must teach. Every success must inspire. Every lunch must threaten to become a carousel post.
Cervantes offers a smaller and saner freedom: allow some windmills to remain windmills. Miss the flight. Complain to your wife. Buy an overpriced sandwich. Reach Cincinnati three hours late without founding a new philosophy of leadership.
The world contains enough majesty without requiring every inconvenience to wear armor.
