The Psychology Behind Viral Pivot Posts (and How I Tested It on Myself)

Recently, I was in a private creator community when a member shared a LinkedIn post that went viral for him. He was laser-focused on the mechanics: the marked-up, annotated screenshot of the article he included, the numbers in the hook, and the formatting choices.

All really valid and astute observations!

But the mechanics were secondary to the big, obvious reason the post took off. In the article, he described how he walked away from a high-paying job at Meta — and gobs of shares in the company — to start his own business.

People love to see others make big bets, especially when those bets involve sticking it to the man and going out on your own. Anyone who works a corporate job has had, at minimum, fleeting thoughts of doing exactly this.

Look around LinkedIn, and you'll see your feed is full of “quitting corporate" content. Or perhaps you'll see its big sister: the layoff rebound. Either way, the arc follows a classic hero's journey. David vs. Goliath. Big vs. small. One person against the machine.

It's just plain fun to root for people doing something scary.

And this isn't just a feeling — it's one of the most replicated findings in social psychology. Researchers call it the underdog effect. A 2008 series of studies published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that people consistently identified with and rooted for underdogs across sports, art, and business. It went further than that: when participants were shown geometric shapes and told some were "struggling," they rooted for the struggling shapes. We are so wired for this that we'll cheer for a triangle. Awwww.

Why? A few reasons the research points to:

We see ourselves in the story. Psychologists found the underdog effect kicks in hardest when it's easy to imagine ourselves in the underdog's circumstances. Neuroscience research from Paul Zak links this to oxytocin and our empathetic response — we root for underdogs when we can picture their fight as our own. Every corporate employee scrolling past that Meta post could picture it.

We're wired for fairness. The just-world hypothesis (Lerner & Miller) suggests we're predisposed to want balance restored. When someone takes on something bigger than themselves, supporting them is how we vote for the world we want to live in.

Unexpected wins feel better. Studies consistently show people get more joy from unexpected successes than expected ones — and witnessing an underdog story produces a sense of hope that lingers for days afterward. Days. Your pivot post doubles as an emotional experience your audience carries around all week.

So when you make a real pivot and tell people about it, you hand your audience the most magnetic narrative structure that exists.

Which brings me to the important caveat.

The pivot must be earned, authentic, and documented to work

I shouldn't have to say this, but manufacturing a pivot for momentum's sake is a recipe for failure. It will read hollow, and it's not sustainable. I think we all know those people who have their next groundbreaking, money-making idea every 365 days. (Not picking on network marketers here, but I've watched many people from my past switch network marketing companies like they change seasonal wardrobes — each time SWEARING that THIS ONE is the best thing since sliced bread.)

Do that, and you fatigue your audience. No one wants to be the boy who cried pivot. Over time, it reads as unreliable.

But assuming your pivot is authentic and earned, we need to move into territory I watch so few folks wade into:

Publicly boosting the pivot.

I work with a lot of very experienced professionals who are afraid to talk about their pivot as ruthlessly and passionately as they should. In my experience, that's due to a wrongful fear that it somehow diminishes their authority and credibility around the "new thing."

Take a former corporate VP who is now doing leadership coaching. The fear sounds like: "If I tout this as something new and exciting, no one will think I'm an expert in this new venture and hire me. I need to launch straight into my expertise to prove my credibility in the category."

My thoughts when I hear this:

By buying into this seemingly valid yet defeating misconception, we ignore some basic facts about business:

The launch of anything is often your highest sales season. Newness and novelty — even in professional services — generate excitement and get people to pay attention. Skipping the pivot story means skipping the one window where attention naturally floods in.

Your first wave of business will almost always come from referrals. Even for the first couple of years. And to get people referring, you need them cheering you on and rooting for you. To presume you'll just start posting credibility pieces aimed at your ideal client on LinkedIn and convert like hotcakes is ludicrous. Your first swath of business will come from peers, strategic partners, and former colleagues who send folks your way. By documenting your pivot and talking about it loudly and frequently, you remind those critical referral points that you are open for business.

Do NOT shortchange yourself here. People want to help. They want to see you win. Give them the opportunity to.

How to talk about your pivot — and on what timeline

So you've earned the pivot (or were unwillingly forced into it, sorry, my laid-off contingency here) and you're willing to boost it. Now the practical question: what do you say, and when? Each of these moments has a post format that works — I keep a whole library of templates for exactly this — but the sequence matters most. Here's how I advise clients to run it.

Use LinkedIn's "Celebrate an Occasion" post feature. LinkedIn knows the highest-engaging content on the platform is people supporting new position announcements — it creates low-stakes engagement. Even the most like-allergic folks (cough, attorneys, cough cough) feel okay giving you a thumbs up on a new chapter. So the algorithm boosts these for easy wins.

We've all seen someone who never publishes anything on LinkedIn announce a new position and get catapulted to 800+ reactions. Easy peasy. Don't announce your pivot in a plain-text post when the platform is handing you a megaphone.

It's hard for someone to root for you if they don't think you have anything at risk. Saying "I'm making this pivot and I have a huge safety net and zero worries in the world" is AWESOME for you — and it won't solicit an ounce of community support.

Remember the underdog research: people rally when they can see the uphill part of the battle. You don't need to manufacture sympathy here. Even something as simple as "I'm a little nervous — this wasn't exactly what I did in my 9-to-5" will do the trick.

This is a great example from Sabina Sulat.

Announcing a pivot, acknowledging the fear, and then never returning to give your audience payoff on your big bet is zero bits compelling. You opened a story loop; now you have to keep feeding it. Share your victories along the way. Let people cheer with you, not just for you once.

Got your first client? Post about it. Made your first $1,000? Yep, that'll do. Hit your first 100 email subscribers? Yahtzee.

The error here is thinking you have to wait for something climactic and life-altering to share. NOPE. First, that takes time, and the payoff is too suspended — your audience forgets they were rooting for you. Second, waiting for something huge is an unrelatable arc. People like micro-wins. Most of your readers will never have a million-dollar exit to relate to, but every single one of them knows the feeling of a first small yes.

Take the stellar example below from Natasha Walstra:

Bonus: Kit reached out to her afterward to feature her! Don’t underestimate your wins.

This is why I'm so envious of new entrepreneurs. You're in the honeymoon phase where EVERYTHING is exciting, and sharing about it accordingly translates that excitement straight to your audience. Eleven years in, I try to approach every win in my business with the beginner lens I once had. Which leads me to…

My turn: betting a 50,000-person audience on books

For a year now, I’ve had an itch to get back to a niche I once ran an entire agency around: helping authors build personal brands so they can sell their books and build thought-leadership businesses around them.

This wasn't blind passion. Two critical drivers backed it:

• The crowd told me. Any time I shared content about using LinkedIn for book marketing or landing keynote speaking opportunities, the crowd went wild.
• The mission pulled me. I'm an avid reader, and it saddens me that the proliferation of short-form content and AI is moving us toward a post-literate society. Long-form reading begets long-form thinking and nuance in a way short-form just doesn't. I will die on this hill.

So my team and I spent the better part of 2026 acting on it. Behind closed doors, I worked tirelessly to develop a program that helps non-fiction business authors build their brands on LinkedIn.

Those head-down months followed a process I know by heart, the same one I walk my own students through in my 30-Day LinkedIn Brand Builder Program: I pressure-tested my most marketable skills against this new direction, confirmed authors were my million-dollar market, and then packaged my expertise into an offer I knew would be irresistible. (I reworked that offer over and over and over before it became Sell Your First 1,000 Books on LinkedIn.)

I didn't mention any of it publicly. I was head-down for months. We decided to officially launch the first cohort at the end of August — which meant that beginning in July, it was lights, camera, action, PIVOT.

I didn't want to merely announce a program. I wanted to boldly announce that I was wagering my newly minted 50K LinkedIn following would follow me into the world of books, publishing, and keynoting.

And I was nervous about this. I have many brand partnerships that aren't author-specific. Additionally, many of the people who've followed me over the years didn't do so to publish a book.

So I did what felt natural to my creator tendencies: I started documenting how I planned to pivot — and all my fears around it. (Sound familiar? Announcement. Fear. Updates. Micro-wins. I ran the exact playbook above on myself.)

As I suspected, the bet paid off big time: 95 authors enrolled in the new program, Sell Your First 1,000 Books on LinkedIn — 20 above our goal.

But the part that surprised even me was that every other program I run saw a spike in interest too. More interest than when we were explicitly pushing them.

That's the underrated bonus of boosting a pivot publicly. The story sells the new thing AND reintroduces your entire body of work to an audience that's suddenly paying close attention again.

The takeaway

Your pivot is the single most relatable, research-backed story arc you will ever get to tell — and you only get to tell it while it's happening.

Document it. Boost it. Let people root for you. And if my season is any proof, the audience you're afraid of losing may just follow you somewhere better.

If you're sitting on a pivot of your own — or you know you have expertise worth betting on but haven't figured out your version of the announcement yet — this is exactly the work we do inside the 30-Day LinkedIn Brand Builder. In 30 days, you'll identify your most marketable skills, find your million-dollar market, package your expertise into an offer people can't ignore, and get the exact templates to share it all on LinkedIn.

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It's the same process I just used on myself, and 95 authors can tell you how the sequel turned out. Our final cohort kicks off on October 5th — grab your spot here. Come make your big bet with a whole cohort rooting for you from day one.

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