Write the reason down: why every LinkedIn invitation needs one
In late May 1876, Charles Darwin started writing a memoir for his children. He was 67 and famous. He began it at a relative’s house in Surrey and kept at it for nearly an hour on most afternoons, with no thought that anyone else would read it.
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In the part about his most famous book, he mentions a habit he’d kept for years. Whenever he came across a fact, an observation or a thought that went against his own conclusions, he made a note of it “without fail and at once.”
He gave the reason, too. He had learned that facts against him slipped out of his memory much faster than facts in his favor, so he stopped trusting his memory with them.
The notes went back a long way. He opened his first notebook on the subject in July 1837, 22 years before the book came out.
You can see the habit in the book itself. The first edition of On the Origin of Species came out in 1859. Its sixth chapter, “Difficulties on Theory,” opens by admitting that some objections were so serious he still found them staggering.
Darwin wrote that, thanks to his notes, hardly anyone raised an objection he hadn’t at least noticed and tried to answer.
Memory is a kind editor. It keeps the wins, trims the misses and quietly rewrites the reasons after the fact.
Writing the reason down at the moment you decide takes the pen away from it.
A reason on paper is a reason you have to have
Something else happens when a reason has to go on paper. You find out whether you had one.
On 9 June 2004, Jeff Bezos emailed Amazon’s senior team to say there would be no more PowerPoint at their meetings. Ideas would come as written memos instead. His case, in the email, was that a memo told as a story in full sentences “forces better thought” than a deck of slides.
Amazon still works this way. Its 2017 letter to shareholders describes meetings that start with everyone reading a 6-page memo in silence.
The same letter is honest about the cost. A great memo gets written, rewritten, shared for comments, set aside for a couple of days and edited again, and it can’t be done in a day or two.
A slide lets you put a claim next to a chart and move on. A paragraph makes you say how one thing connects to the next, and when a link is missing, everyone in the room can see the gap.
Put the stories side by side and you get a plain rule. Write the reason down when you decide, and write down what goes against you as well.
What most outreach can’t answer
Most outreach runs without reasons. A search filter picks the people, a template picks the words, and when it goes badly nobody can say which part failed. When it goes well, nobody can say that either.
Ask why a certain person got an invitation last Tuesday. With a list built from a filter, the honest answer is “they matched.” That isn’t a reason; it’s a description of the filter.
A reason is one sentence about one person, and it points at something you could go and check. Here’s the difference, in an invented example for a company whose software helps other firms pass security reviews.
Sample, invented Not a reason: she’s head of sales at a 30-person software company in Austin. That’s who she is, and any filter can tell you that.
Sample, invented A reason: she posted on Tuesday that her team keeps losing deals in security review. That’s what is happening to her this month, in her own words, and it’s the problem the client solves.
Founders already work this way when they hire. Nobody offers a job because a person matched a title filter. Before an offer goes out, you want to know why this person, for this job, and why now.
A reason log is the simplest answer to the question. For every person you invite, you write one sentence like the second one: why this person, and why now.
The sentence sits in the log next to the first line you sent and what happened, and you read the whole page once a week.
A few things change once every invitation needs a sentence.
The list gets shorter. Some people you’d have invited have no reason you can write, so they drop out, and that tells you something about your targeting.
The first line gets easier. If the reason is that she posted on Tuesday about deals stuck in security review, the opening line nearly writes itself. It sounds like a person because it came from one.
A bad week becomes useful. When replies drop, you can look back at the reasons and see which kinds went quiet. Without the log, a bad week is only a mood.
And you can check the work. A founder who reads “matched the filter” in their own log knows something is wrong without asking anyone.
The work also stops living in one head. A reason on the page can be read by the founder, by a new operator, or by you in 6 months, once you’ve forgotten why that account looked so good.
Writing a reason down doesn’t make it right, and a written reason can still be a weak one. But a weak reason on paper can be argued with. A weak reason in your head just gets used again next week.
Darwin’s rule, applied to a sales week
Darwin’s habit has a direct version in outreach: write down the people you chose not to invite, and why.
Maybe they sell what you sell, or their company is bigger than the ones you sell to, or they’re on your do-not-contact list. A skip is a small note against your own plan, and it’s exactly the kind of note memory drops first.
Skips earn their place quickly. If 40 of 100 people are skipped for the same reason, that reason belongs in the search filters, and next week’s list starts better. Our guide to LinkedIn outreach for founders explains why you write down every skip, with an example week.
A date on the page
Darwin’s notes paid off once more, in a way he never planned. Early in the summer of 1858, an essay reached him from Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist working in the Malay Archipelago. It set out the same theory Darwin had been building for about 20 years.
Two of Darwin’s friends, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, settled it with paper. An extract from Darwin’s manuscript and a letter he’d sent to Asa Gray, dated 5 September 1857, were published alongside Wallace’s essay by the Linnean Society that year.
A reason in your head is a claim. A reason on paper, with a date on it, is a record.
A log you keep only for yourself can still flatter you, because you get to choose which weeks you look at. The fix is the one Darwin’s friends used: put a date on it and let other people read it.
So if someone else runs your outreach, read their reasons, dated, bad weeks included.
It would be easy to show only the good weeks. It would also turn the log back into what memory already is: a highlight reel.
At GTME, a person makes that call on every plan: your operator, a GTM engineer on our team. From our Signal plan up, the reason can start from a buying signal, which is a reason with a date already on it.
If you’re comparing services, ask for the reasons before anything else. It’s the first question in how to choose a LinkedIn outreach agency: who picks the people, and can I see why?
Darwin didn’t write down the facts against him because he was humble. He wrote them down because he knew his memory was on his side.
Sources
All checked on 28 September 2026.
- 01Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, begun in May 1876.
- 02Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, first edition, 1859.
- 03Madeline Stone, the 2004 Bezos email on memos, Yahoo Finance, 28 July 2015.
- 04Amazon, 2017 Letter to Shareholders.