I will be honest with you. I am in my dating again era, and my feed lately has had a very particular point of view about it.
Medical professionals behaving badly. Men ghosting. Men dismissing. Men taking up space in ways that make your skin crawl. And the algorithm, being the deeply attentive tool it is, keeps delivering more. More confirmation. More outrage. More certainty that I already understand a very complicated subject.
As a business leader, I think carefully about what shapes the way we make decisions. How we hire, how we listen, how we show up for the people around us. And lately I have been sitting with something genuinely uncomfortable: the feeds shaping our daily thinking are not making us more informed. They are making us more reactive. More certain. And quietly, without us fully noticing, less capable of understanding the whole picture of anything.
Then I watched an ad that stopped me completely.
The Ad That Made Me Feel Something
An Australian activewear brand called LSKD released a campaign around International Women’s Day. It follows a woman on a run. Instead of the familiar feel-good montage of sunrises and strong strides, you hear her internal monologue. Every man she passes triggers a quiet calculation. And then a male runner falls into step behind her, and her thoughts move from “it’s probably nothing” to “is anyone going to hear me if I scream?”
The ad closed with one statistic: 92% of women feel unsafe on a run.
I felt that number in my whole body long after the screen went dark.
Your Feed Is Not a Research Report
Social media is not a balanced curriculum. It is a mirror. It reflects back what we have already engaged with, what drew a reaction from us, what kept us scrolling. When something makes us feel righteous or vindicated, the algorithm doubles down. We begin to mistake frequency for truth and volume for evidence.
This is not a small problem. This is how worldviews calcify.
I noticed it in myself after weeks of content that confirmed every frustration I have ever carried. My opinions were quietly hardening into beliefs. And beliefs that go unchallenged do not stay beliefs for long. They become the lens through which you see everything: the people on your team, the person across the table, the candidate walking into your office for an interview.
That is not a leadership quality. That is a liability.
The question worth asking is not whether your feed is showing you real things. It probably is. The question is whether it is showing you all the things. Whether what you are consuming is the full story or a very convincing half of one.
“The more emotionally activated I am about something, the more I know I need to go learn the other side. Not to abandon what I know. But because certainty that has never been tested is not wisdom. It is just a very loud feeling.”
So I Picked Up a Book I Might Not Have Otherwise
I picked up Scott Galloway’s book Notes on Being a Man. Not because I was certain it would change my perspective. But somewhere beneath the noise, I recognized something honest: I was operating on an emotional, experiential, and not remotely complete view of an important subject.
That recognition matters. It is the small, quiet moment when you catch yourself being certain about something you have never actually studied from all sides. And in business, those moments deserve your full attention, because the places where we feel most certain are usually the places where we have stopped being curious.
The principle I am trying to hold onto now: the more emotionally activated I am about something, the more I owe it to myself to go learn the other side. Not to dismiss what I know. Not to excuse what is genuinely harmful. But because certainty that has never been tested is not wisdom. It is just a very loud feeling.
What This Has to Do With How You Lead
Fixed mindsets do not announce themselves. They do not arrive with a warning. They appear in the meeting where you have already decided the answer before the conversation begins. In the hiring process where your mind was made up in the first thirty seconds. In the client relationship where you diagnosed the problem before you asked a single question.
We are being shaped, and I do not use that word lightly, to skip the other side. To stay in the comfortable warmth of content that agrees with us. And the more we allow that to happen, the smaller our thinking becomes, even as we feel more informed than ever.
When was the last time you genuinely sought out a perspective that challenged something you hold as settled? Not one you could easily dismiss. One that sat with you uncomfortably for a while. One that asked something of you.
The most well-rounded leaders I have known are not the ones with the strongest opinions. They are the ones who know how to hold an opinion loosely while they keep gathering. The ones who can say, without embarrassment, that they are still learning something.
You Are Allowed to Not Know Yet
You do not have to have a fully formed opinion right now. You are allowed to say you do not know enough yet. You are allowed to be in the middle of learning before you plant your flag. That is not weakness. That is the foundation of every good decision you will ever make.
The LSKD ad is not wrong. And I am not done learning. Both of those things are true at the same time. And sitting inside that tension, without rushing to resolve it, is actually where growth lives.
The next time something makes your blood boil, or your heart sink, or your feed feels like a very convincing argument, I hope you will ask yourself one honest question: what is the half of this story I have not read yet?
Build a Team That Knows How to Think in Full
The most enduring brands and the strongest teams are built by leaders who stay curious long after they have every reason to stop. At StringCan Interactive, we partner with purpose-driven organizations to ask better questions, see the fuller picture, and make decisions rooted in genuine understanding rather than comfortable certainty.
If you are ready to lead with that kind of depth, we would love to be part of the conversation. Connect with StringCan Interactive to get started.
