Through a new original series, LinkedIn is looking to show how perseverance leads to success. The professional platform has premiered Catalyst, in which business leaders recall the obstacles they had to overcome in order to achieve their career goals.
The first batch of Catalyst episodes will tell the stories of five creators, all of whom are active on LinkedIn. Together, they have encountered a wide variety of hurdles. Some Catalyst subjects, like Soapbox co-founder David Simnick, had to figure out how to turn around failing businesses. Others dealt with personal issues. Fact-checking exec Ken Oliver went to prison before becoming the VP of Checkr.org.
“I had no idea of what life in prison really meant,” Oliver says in the Catalyst trailer. “I knew that I wasn’t going to let the circumstance of what was happening to me define me.”
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The first episode of Catalyst focuses on Dr. Sian Proctor, who was rejected from NASA’s astronaut selection program. She eventually became the first African-American woman to pilot a spacecraft, and she now reaches more than 17,000 followers on her personal LinkedIn account.
Catalyst is published through LinkedIn’s newsletter platform, which the company has been pushing as it looks to attract more creators. You can watch the first episode of the series here, and you can join Catalyst‘s 229,000 subscribers (at the time of this post) if you’d like to stay up to date on the show.
For LinkedIn, Catalyst is the next step in an ambitious content initiative that has grown over the past year. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky trod similar territory to Catalyst when he walked The Path in a LinkedIn original series. The platform’s programming strategy is being led by Courtney Coupe. The Emmy winner joined LinkedIn from CNN last year.
