Yes, I write every day. Not because I have something profound to say every morning. I write because my thinking is messy.
And thinking more often doesn’t help.
Thoughts tend to stay fuzzy. They can “feel” right, but somehow you’re never really able to precisely capture them.
Writing is different. The moment you write a thought down in words, you have to commit to one way of articulating the thought. You can’t hide behind a vague feeling that “it somehow makes sense.” It’s this specific way of saying it.
And it either works or it doesn’t.
When it works. Bingo.
When it doesn’t. Well, that’s actually even better. Because now you can wrestle with it. What exactly doesn’t work? Is the logic flawed? Or the tone a bit off? Does it make sense but feel wrong. Or vice versa?
That’s why to me, writing daily is a very selfish practice.
It’s how I make sense of things.
The public part comes second. The feedback helps, of course. When someone pushes back, I get to test the idea again. Is there a flaw? Did I oversimplify? Did I miss something important?
But even without that, the act of writing is already the work.
Many leaders think writing is something you do for others. A mail. A strategy statement. A speech. And when they sit down to write these pieces, it feels hard, the words are never quite right, and they conclude, they’re not “eloquent”.
In my experience, that’s simply not true. They just postponed the hard part until it became public. That moment when you try to articulate what you really think and realize you’re not quite there yet.
When you treat it as a selfish practice, that changes. Writing for others will be the easy part.
Keep lighting the path,
Michael
