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LinkedIn Profile Makeover — The Boundary Edition

For Jerry Michalski · July 2026 · to complete before the launch text post goes live

The governing principle: the launch post will drive more profile visits than anything in years, and every visitor should land in the same story the post started. Nothing from your past gets deleted — it gets demoted into provenance. The history is the receipts; it just shouldn't be the greeting.

1. Headline

Current: "Curator of The World's Largest Mind Map | Guide to the World in Context | Tech Visionary for 30+ Years | Keynote Speaker | Expert on Trust & Mistrust"

Five identities, and the visitor must choose. The redesign: one claim, one proof — and because LinkedIn truncates headlines to roughly the first 45–60 characters in feeds and hover cards, the claim must live entirely in the front half.

Candidates (tightest first):

Recommended: the first. "Guide" and "boundary" are the two words the campaign teaches people to attach to your name, and it outlives the series.

2. Banner Image

Canvas: 1584 × 396 px. Critical constraint: your profile photo circle overlaps the banner's lower-left on desktop and covers even more on mobile — treat the left ~25% as a no-text zone, and keep anything essential inside the middle 60% vertically (top and bottom edges crop on some devices). Build it in Canva or Figma; export PNG.

Concept A — The Plex (recommended). A high-resolution screenshot of your Brain's plex, ideally a neighborhood the videos will visit (the GFC nexus or the virtuous/vicious junction — so the banner literally previews the series). Treatment: deepen it toward your Deep Navy so it reads as night-sky terrain rather than software screenshot — lower the exposure, let the links glow. This matters: untreated app screenshots read as "tool demo"; a darkened, luminous plex reads as territory. Text set in the right two-thirds, Bebas Neue (your existing display face), Cream or Canary against the navy:

THE BOUNDARY (smaller, one line beneath): 30 years · 625,000 ideas · every link a decision

Concept B — The Line itself. A split composition: left side, the plex (organic, hand-built, luminous links); right side, a smooth featureless gradient — the machine's pre-averaged interior. A thin Canary vertical line divides them, and you belong to the left. Text sits on the smooth right side, where legibility is free:

Your organization is deciding right now, mostly by accident, how much of its thinking to outsource.

This is the bolder, more conceptual banner — it is the argument — but the keeper line at banner scale must stay readable on a phone; test at 360 px wide before committing. If it's too small, fall back to "DECIDE IT ON PURPOSE" as the short form.

Concept C — Minimal. Solid Deep Navy, nothing but the short line "The boundary between human and machine thinking — guided." Elegant, but it spends your one unfair visual advantage: nobody else on LinkedIn can show a 30-year plex. Use only if A and B feel busy.

Whichever concept: headline, banner, and posts should say one thing between them. If the headline says "boundary," the banner shouldn't introduce a second metaphor.

3. About Section

Current opening: "What does an optimistic future look like? How might we help shape and realize…" — lovely, but it could belong to a thousand futurists, and you are not a thousand futurists.

Rebuild on the wake-up anatomy: their situation → grace → credential-as-proof → the work → the longer story.

Draft:

Your organization is deciding right now, mostly by accident, how much of its thinking to outsource. Not in a strategy meeting — in a thousand small moments that arrive disguised as conveniences.

This isn't negligence. Even the leaders thinking hardest about AI haven't decided how to shape these forces, because you can't shape what you haven't seen named. Naming them is what I do.

I've spent thirty years on the other side of that line. Since before Google existed, I've been building an external memory — 625,000 ideas, over 1.2 million links, every one a decision I made and can stand behind. It's the world's largest published Brain, open for anyone to explore at JerrysBrain.com. It means the boundary between human and machine intelligence isn't a topic I research; it's where I live.

Today I guide leaders across that boundary in focused working sessions: you bring your organization's actual AI tangle, we map it live, and you leave with the map, a vector, and your next three moves.

The longer story, for the curious: I spent the 1990s as a top technology analyst (editor of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0), then decades helping organizations understand trust — founding REX, the Relationship Economy eXpedition, and Open Global Mind, and developing Design from Trust. All of it turns out to have been preparation for this boundary.

If you're leaning into these questions on purpose, write to me. I read everything.

(Adjust the "longer story" facts to taste — it should compress your actual résumé, not mine.)

4. Featured Section

The Featured section is the storefront shelf, and right now it likely holds an archive. Redesign: it holds only the current story, in this order as pieces go live —

  1. The launch text post (pin the day it publishes)
  2. Video 1 (replaces or joins it in week 1)
  3. The Framer offer page (added in week 5, once live)

Everything else — podcasts, past talks, older articles — comes off Featured. It all survives in your Activity feed and Experience entries; Featured just stops being a museum and starts being a door.

5. Experience & Supporting Details

6. Sequencing

  1. Banner + headline + About rebuilt before the launch post (these three are one visit's impression).
  2. Featured cleared the same day; launch post pinned the moment it's live.
  3. Sociate first line and custom button: same week, lower urgency.
  4. Framer page added to Featured and the button in week 5.

One afternoon of work, most of it in Canva and a text editor — no bureaucracy, no waiting, exactly your speed.