Browsing LinkedIn, especially being a product manager, can be depressing and intimidating. You will notice that everyone is a leader, a visionary or a futurist, working on the coolest AI features, and responsible for entire lines of products. They are called in as speakers at product forums. Never mind that there may not be enough people on Earth to follow all these leaders or attend that many forums.

If you are not among the ones showing off your achievements, chances are you feel left behind. After all, you are responsible only for some mundane feature which few users (if any) care about. You are merely fighting fires, not writing 10-year strategy docs. You feel like yet another cog in the wheel. Insignificant.

I used to feel the same way—until a couple of weeks ago, when I had a hard realisation. Browsing through the LinkedIn profiles of some ex-colleagues, I caught myself saying, “No, you were certainly not doing THAT”. “Making Copilots? Yeah, right!”. “Engineering Leader. Of course.”

And that’s when I realised: I was suffering from Gell-Mann Amnesia, a cognitive bias where we are skeptical of the news in a domain we have knowledge about but blindly trust it in areas we don’t.

For my ex-colleagues, I could spot the exaggerations in their posts because I knew their roles and responsibilities intimately. But for everyone else, I took their claims at face value. A textbook case of Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Many of these people are undoubtedly working on important projects that their company deeply cares about. Some of them, by definition, are leading large teams and driving business-critical initiatives. But not everyone.

Now, whenever I come across someone’s LinkedIn profile who claims to be a “leader”, or a “visionary”, or infinite variations thereof, I read it with a fistful of salt. The descriptions of their prowess and achievements might well be true, but I would rather err on the side of being cautious and maintain my sanity than let their posts make me feel insecure about my achievements, and look down upon my work.

Recognising the strong effect of Gell-Mann Amnesia at play has made browsing LinkedIn far less intimidating—and a little more palatable! So, the next time you’re scrolling through your feed and feeling inadequate, remember: not everything is as it seems.