You May Need To Start Creating - One Year and 50,000 Words Later

A year of writing the newsletter — 3 takeaways.

It's the 2nd of November, 2023, I’m at the seaside in Poland with my two friends. We are walking towards the beach with a bottle of champagne.

I haven’t been able to convince myself to start publishing, so I’ve used an old trick called social pressure. I invited my friends for the launch party of the newsletter, so there is no way to postpone it.

We stop at a bench that overlooks the sea.

I set the publication from private to public. From now on — it’s live. I opened a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne. The plastic cork pops off, and a bit of the drink spills out. We empty the bottle into paper cups, raise a toast to the newsletter’s success and go in search of a warmer place.

Now, a year has passed — that’s 52 articles and 50,000 words.

Let me celebrate by sharing 3 takeaways with you.

Before we begin, I have an important news to share:

Launching “EMpower: Hacking Engineering Management”

I'm teaming up with

Anton Zaides

, who writes a great newsletter

Leading Developers

.

In a few weeks, we’ll help 50 ambitious engineering managers to:

• Gain more time to focus on what matters to you

• Stop feeling stressed and overwhelmed

• Build high-performing teams

We understand you're busy with real problems. That’s why we've distilled 20 years of experience into a 10-minute-per-week email course, lasting 8 weeks.

You can invest in your career for only $59 for the entire course — To learn more:

Now, back to the article:

Takeaways

If you appreciate stats and numbers I put these in Post Notes, at the end. However, I don't want to make it about numbers, but rather to help you decide if you should share parts of your brain with us.

If you ever consider sharing your knowledge in any shape or form, these are for you.

A year has passed.

1. “Writing is Thinking on Paper” (quote by William Zinsser)

We forget, we change our minds, or we assume we understand something.

Writing down what you know helps with:

• Preserving the knowledge about the given topic

• Noticing gaps in your understanding

• Practising communication

I define writing (and reading) as the transfer of thoughts, from the brain of the writer to the brain of the reader. It's a complicated process but the more you write the easier it becomes.

You can journal and write only for yourself, which still helps with shaping thoughts and ideas. But writing for others is a different and demanding game. When you need to shape your thoughts for the reader, it requires thinking about their context and how it will be processed.

In practice: Start small. Set 30 minutes aside every day to write about anything you want. Just make sure to block out any distractions so that it’s just you and an open document or a piece of paper.

2. Start Now — No Need to Postpone It

My longest-lasting excuse was: "I need the right platform to start". It took me 9 months to decide between Ghost and Substack, which was nonsense. The platform does not matter that much — if I were to send a message to myself from the past it would be: "Just start!"

The most common excuse I hear is: "I don't have a unique point of view". I don’t agree when people say they have nothing to contribute. No one has the same set of experiences, knowledge and life stories as you have. It's more honest to state that "I'm afraid of sharing", which was true for me.

The sooner you start the more knowledge and experiences you can save from disappearing.

Think of your online writing as an insurance policy. When part of your knowledge is publicly available, it'll help you stand out among other candidates or it'll help you build an audience to reach potential clients. I consider each article as a potential lottery ticket, which increases the probability of new opportunities.

In practice: The platform does not matter. You can publish on your social media, Substack or any online blogging platform. Try to share your thoughts on a given topic and see what happens.

3. Think of Distribution

I'm sorry to inform you but the act of writing is not enough to get many readers. I was overly optimistic about it. The Internet is flooded with content and to reach people with your writing you need to promote it.

It was way outside of my comfort zone to broadcast what I'd written. During the last 12 months, I've learned a lot about copywriting, storytelling, marketing and social media. But the important thing is that people don't care that much about what you say or write. When you enjoy your work and believe in it, don't hesitate to promote it, or even ask for money when you provide value.

To improve in areas that were completely outside my circle of competence, I’ve learned the most from these sources over the past 12 months:

For copywriting, I recommend following Harry Dry, his newsletter and listening to the episode of the How I Write podcast, where he was a guest. He offers a simple framework that makes copies much better.

For marketing, I recommend reading the

Marketing Ideas

newsletter by

Tom Orbach

to get a fresh idea every Friday.

For storytelling, I recommend one of the best books I read this year “Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling” by Matthiew Dicks. I found it thanks to his appearance in The Knowledge Project podcast. The intro to this article is written using guidelines from his book.

In practice: Your distribution starts with your friends and colleagues and I’m grateful for my supportive friends and first subscribers. Then, look for communities or fellow writers with whom you can exchange feedback. You can connect with creators in tech/leadership space on our open Discord server, which we set up with

Dariusz Sadowski

,

Samuel Kollát

, and

Yordan Ivanov

.

Summary

Writing ideas down is a good way to understand our perspective, and that understanding is even better if we share it with others.

It has been an incredible 12 months. The best part for me is meeting very supportive people – online writers who have become friends. I’ll continue exploring the mission of Perspectiveship: I’m writing this newsletter to share different perspectives with you, so you might make better decisions in your life and work.

As for convincing you to start writing — I'd love to read your perspectives!

Thanks for reading,

— Michał

---

Post Notes

Numbers & Highlights — Last 12 months

Stats:

• Articles: 52

• Total Views: 72,950

• Subscribers: 1360

  

Top 3 Articles (by likes):

• 30 Complaint Filed About People Complaining

• 29 Second-order Thinking

• 29 Hanlon’s Razor

Top 3 Articles (by views):

• 5.7k On One-on-Ones - Insights From 1,500 Meetings

• 5.2k You May Need a Gap Year - Five Reflections

• 4.6k Ground Rules of Fairness at Work

Top 3 Articles (by new-subs):

• +40 On Generating Ideas - Leadership & Work

• +31 Second-order Thinking

• +31 Inversion

Subjectively, the best articles I've written in the last 12 months were guest posts — thanks to Anton and Orel for the opportunity — as these took more time and iterations.

• Tech Books: Secrets of Clear Thinking

• Leading Developers: 3 steps to write messages that people will enjoy reading

---

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Articles that might help you explore new perspectives, which I’ve read recently:

• How to get a Job Interview call from any company —

  Gourav Khanijoe
  ‘s article inspired me to add an “insurance” aspect to this article.

• "How To Create Your Own Luck" —

  John Crickett
  ’s thoughts on increasing one’s luck surface area highly resonate with writing online.

• How to become a better solopreneur by

  Orel Zilberman

Connect

LinkedIn | Substack DM | Mentoring