On Being Findable vs. Being Useful

For about twenty years, the dominant verb of professional presence on the internet was be findable.

You posted. You optimized. You SEO'd your name. You showed up where people were searching, hoping the right one of them would land on you at the right time. The whole personal-brand economy ran on the premise that visibility was the bottleneck — that if you were in the right room (or the right feed, or the right search result), the rest would take care of itself.