Consistent Content — Issue 007: The Only Asset That Moves With You

Every job comes with an expiration date you don't know about.

Not because you'll do something wrong. Not because you'll stop being good at what you do. But because companies restructure, industries shift, leadership changes, and budgets get cut. The job you have today is not guaranteed to be the job you have in two years, and most people won't see it coming until it's already happening.

What you build publicly — your voice, your point of view, your body of work — doesn't expire. It moves with you through every job, every pivot, every industry shift. It's the one career asset that no employer can take back when they hand you the severance letter.

This issue is about that asset and why right now is the most important time to start building it.

This issue is about that second track — the one that pays you outside your day job.

What I will cover:

Here's the reality of the current job market that most people don't want to sit with.

The companies laying people off right now aren't struggling businesses making desperate decisions. They're profitable companies optimizing headcount, restructuring teams, and replacing roles with AI-assisted workflows. Block, Google, Meta, Amazon — the layoff wave of the last two years hit some of the most successful companies in the world. No title, no tenure, no performance record fully protects you from a decision made in a boardroom you'll never enter.

That's not a reason to panic. It's a reason to build something that isn't contingent on any single employer's decisions.

A public body of work — consistent content that documents how you think, what you know, and how you see your industry — is the only career asset that is fully yours. It doesn't live on a company server. It doesn't get reassigned when you leave. It doesn't reset to zero when you update your employment status. Every post you publish is a permanent, portable record that travels with you from role to role, company to company, industry to industry.

The people who land fastest after a layoff aren't always the most qualified. They're the most visible — the ones who spent the months and years before the layoff building a public presence that made them findable, recognizable, and trusted before they ever needed to be.

There's also a cultural barrier worth naming directly. A lot of professionals don't post because their colleagues aren't posting, their boss isn't posting, and putting yourself out there publicly feels like overstepping — like you're trying to be bigger than the team. That fear is understandable and it's also completely misplaced. When the layoff comes, and for a lot of people it will, the company that hires you next will choose you partly because you have a public presence and your peers don't. The content you were nervous to post while employed becomes the evidence that gets you hired when you're not.

In October 2020, in the middle of COVID, I started my career at Block. I was living in Brooklyn, the city was still largely shut down, and I was figuring out what it meant to build a career in an industry I was still learning.

In 2023 I started posting on LinkedIn out of pure instinct — not with a strategy, not with a plan, just to see what the platform was like. I posted news that interested me. I flooded the zone sometimes, eight individual posts in a day. I was testing, learning, figuring out what landed. One of the things I started was a series called 10 Things I'm Paying Attention to Today — a weekly roundup of the stories I was already tracking as part of my job.

Then the news came. Block was laying off workers as part of a broader fintech wave, and my role was part of it.

I won't pretend the news didn't hit. But I remember the feeling that came alongside it: I had been building something. Not a massive audience, not a viral account, just a consistent public presence that was starting to reflect who I was professionally and how I thought about my industry. When I started the job search, that presence gave me something most people in my position didn't have — something to point to that wasn't just a résumé.

The part that still surprises me is how the next role came in.

I had covered the Tubi rebrand as part of my regular 10 Things series — just another story in a weekly roundup I'd been doing for months. The CMO at Tubi saw the post, DMd me, and asked if we could grab time for an intro. That conversation led to my current role as brand strategy manager on her team.

She didn't find me through a recruiter. She didn't see my application in a portal. She found a post in a series I'd been running consistently, and that post made her want to know who I was.

The 10 Things series didn't save me from the layoff. Nothing could have. But it made sure that when the layoff happened, I wasn't starting from zero.

The best time to start building your public presence was before you needed it. The second best time is right now, while you still have the stability of employment behind you.

You don't need to post about your job specifically. You don't need to worry about what your boss or colleagues think about your LinkedIn activity. You need to post consistently about what you know and care about, so that when your professional situation changes — and at some point it will — you have a body of work that introduces you before you ever send a message.

Start the series. Pick the format. Show up every week. The brand you build while employed is the asset that carries you when you're not.

Your job is something a company gave you. Your body of work is something no one can take back.

Recent issues: Issue 006: How Consistent Content Pays You
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