Thinking About Thought Leadership

Apps for Your Necktop and Nano-Relationships

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If you spend any time on social media, the term “Thought Leader” probably makes you cringe. It conjures images of self-aggrandising bio descriptions, vacuous motivational quotes, and people obsessed with “engagement strategies” rather than actual ideas. It feels performative. It feels fake.

But if we strip away the buzzwords and the ego, there is something profoundly important at the core of thought leadership. The world doesn’t need more influencers chasing likes. But it desperately needs more people who can help us think in new ways.

In a world where information is abundant and our existential needs are largely met, the ability to process that information — to view the world through a clearer, more useful lens — is one of the most valuable assets we can have.

Files vs. Apps

The late philosopher Daniel Dennett had a brilliant phrase for mental models: he called them “apps for your necktop“.

This analogy captures the essence of real thought leadership perfectly. Most of what we consume on the internet is just “files”. It’s information. It’s a PDF of facts, a news update, or a list of statistics. You download the file, you read it (or skim it), and you file it away. It doesn’t change you.

Thought leadership isn’t about giving people files; it’s about installing an app.

When someone shares a new way of thinking that is unique, coherent, and useful, they are giving you a tool. Once that app is installed in your mind, you can run new data through it. You can look at a problem you’ve faced for years and suddenly see a solution because you’re processing it through a new piece of mental software.

Real thought leadership has three components:

1. It is unique and original: This doesn’t mean it has to be a secret. It just has to be new to the audience.

2. It is true and useful: It follows a coherent logic and can be applied profitably to new questions.

3. It is experiential: It helps others experience themselves thinking in this new way.

The Eccentric Teacher and the Bestselling Author

To understand this, look at two very different examples of thought leaders. One is world-famous; the other was my high school history teacher.

Mr Grossman was, to put it mildly, an eccentric character. He taught us modern history, stuff like the French Revolution. Now, the French Revolution is not a secret. The facts have been known for a couple of centuries. But for a classroom of teenagers, this information was entirely new.

Mr Grossman didn’t just recite dates. He used a theatrical, almost ridiculous delivery style to get the message across. He would rapidly ask and answer his own questions: “And then the committee took the king! Who? The King! Which king? Louis XVI! Where? To the guillotine! Why? Because he betrayed the revolution!”

It was over-the-top. We laughed. But he wasn’t just entertaining us; he was installing an app. He helped us experience inquisitive curiosity. He showed us how to trace the thread from political fervour to terrible violence — a lens I still use today to understand modern politics. In that classroom context, Mr Grossman was a thought leader.

Or consider Malcolm Gladwell. He is the prototype of the modern public intellectual. In his book Outliers, he popularised the “10,000-hour rule”. Gladwell didn’t conduct the original research on practice and success; he synthesised existing academic papers.

However, he did something the original researchers didn’t: he packaged it into a coherent narrative that made us ask a new question about talent. He moved the focus from “who is born gifted?” to “what circumstances allow someone to practice for 10,000 hours?”. He installed a new app for analysing success. You don’t read Malcolm Gladwell to learn facts; you read Malcolm Gladwell to learn how to think like Malcolm Gladwell.

The Levi’s Fallacy

The problem arises when people try to reverse-engineer this process without the substance.

I’ve seen courses on “personal branding” that advise people to write 50 comments a week on LinkedIn to “boost reach”. They treat thought leadership as a game of metrics. This is like giving someone dating advice and telling them, “If you want to find love, you must wear Levi’s jeans.”

Sure, maybe the person you are attracted to likes denim. But if you think the jeans are the cause of the relationship, you have missed the point entirely.

The “50 comments” strategy focuses on the packaging — the Levi’s jeans — rather than the person inside them. If you are intellectually dead, if you have no unique perspective to share, no amount of algorithmic optimisation will make you a thought leader. You might become a noise-maker, but you won’t change anyone’s mind.

The “Nano-relationship”

If it’s not about metrics, how do you actually build an audience? You do it by building relationships.

When you post online, you are engaging in a strange, postmodern form of connection. It isn’t a deep, personal friendship where you know the names of each other’s pets. But it also isn’t a “parasocial” relationship, which implies a delusion where the audience thinks they know a celebrity who doesn’t know they exist.

It is a “nano-relationship” - a genuine exchange at scale.

I post an idea. Maybe it’s a half-baked thought about AI agents or a minor discovery about a tool or technique. I put it out there to see what comes back. Sometimes, silence. Sometimes, people tell me I’m an idiot. But often, it starts a conversation. People refine my thinking; they offer a counter-point I hadn’t considered.

You have to be willing to be vulnerable. You have to step out and say, “Here is how I am seeing the world right now. Does this resonate?”

This is why I don’t try to operationalise my writing too much. I don’t have a spreadsheet calculating the optimal time to post. I tried that; it feels awful. I just share what I’m thinking and more importantly how I’m thinking. If you are consistently interesting and consistently helpful, you build trust over time. It’s a mix of the intellectual (the idea) and the emotional (the vulnerability of sharing it).

Finding Your Context

You might be thinking, “I’m not Malcolm Gladwell. I don’t have a grand theory of everything.”

You don’t need one. You just need to identify the gap between what you know and what your audience knows.

There is a simple test for whether an idea is worth sharing:

1. If you tell it to an expert, they should nod and say, “Yes, obviously.”

2. If you tell it to a novice, their mind should be blown.

Your personal experience is your greatest asset here. When a new AI model drops, thousands of tech accounts will tweet the specs. That’s generic. But if I share my specific experience using it to solve a real problem, and how my thinking changed with my experience, that is unique. No one else has my context.

We Need You

It is easy to look at the noise on social media and decide to opt out. But that would be a mistake.

We need more thought leaders because we need more ways of thinking. The problems we face — in technology, society, and our personal lives — are complex. We cannot solve them with old files. We need new apps.

You have a context that is unique to you. You have an obsession, a hobby, or a professional expertise that you understand deeply. Somewhere out there, there are people who are trying to understand that very thing, and they are missing the mental model that you take for granted.

Don’t worry about the “likes”. Don’t worry about the algorithm. Focus on the person on the other side of the screen. If you can help just one person install a new app for their necktop - if you can help them make a leap in understanding - you have done the work.

That is thought leadership.