The Journey Here..

// The Long Road

This week, Mark Masters posted a little hack to check out how your style in your newsletter has changed over time and how that has shaped your writing - it's a simple trick of using your XML sitemap from your website and then throwing that into ChatGPT with a prompt to analyse your writing - I guess this only works when you've got a catalogue of work to refer to and I am in a privileged position because I've been writing this blog consistently for well over two years.

But when I started writing this newsletter in 2022, I didn’t realise what I was really signing up for.

I thought it was going to be a side project - a nice, disciplined way to share ideas and keep myself accountable whilst also show a bit of myself and generate sales because, you know the saying - content is king (which leads to bucket load of cash). I thought I could add a bit of structure in the chaos.

But looking back now, I can see I wasn’t starting a newsletter, I was starting a conversation with myself.

According to the ChatGPT extract - when I first got going, the writing was LOUD. As I've talked about before - all I would do is throw together lists, goals, numbers and try to find my way by creating 'things' for myself - in reality, these were all the things in my head (goal driven, corporate life) but I didn't know how to express them or write about them - the posts included the bland and mundane things like 'Ten ways to sell' or 'twelve months to change'.

Everything was performance.

Every paragraph trying to prove that I was moving fast enough to matter (again, according to ChatGPT) but I guess that's right - I was striving to find my place - maybe that’s okay, maybe we all start there - chasing the feeling of being seen.

That's how starting a newsletter should feel.

I stated this sporadically - I wanted to get 'going' but didn't know how - there were seriously long gaps in how I showed up, not many editions between 2022 and 2023 but I did my best to put stuff together.

// The Shift

I became frustrated with myself - the sporadic posting of 'newsletters' wasn't serving anyone - no-one knew when I was going to show up again and I didn't know what to write about from week to week - but I kept going and in 2023, I made the commitment to actually stick with it.

And I did.

I made a public announcement that I would never show up with a 'listicle' style blog again, I wanted to tell stories and I wanted to weave my life experience into those stories so the progression happened, somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about and started trying to find out what I actually believed.

The whole tone of the newsletter changed because despite writing more and more, the pace actually slowed and the posts got quieter, braver, messier but that's what I believe you need to go through to find your 'voice' - the way that you write and the way you portray what you want to get across through the medium of writing.

I distinctly remember saying this in a previous blog and it still feels weird to me but writing is a skill that you can actually get better at - like painting, drawing or, heaven forbid, Instagram posts - you can improve over time and the more you do it, the better you become at communicating.

I was doing that - I was communicating.

I think it was when I wrote about burnout, or breaking my leg, or closing a company I once thought would define me - that’s when I started to recognise my own voice (and strangely, that's when ChatGPT thought I was becoming a writer too).

I've always been 'anti-corporate' when it comes to writing posts on Linkedin and sounding like a corporate robot where you 'are pleased to announce' or 'we're happy to declare..' - that was never me and I think this was now starting to show up in my writing, the voice I used in real life was starting to show on the page.

I'm going to try and explain something to you now - there are LOADS of people out there who struggle with this - but you don't need to write or say anything in any other way than how YOU want to say it. If you sound like all the other corporate robots on Linkedin (or anywhere else you post) then you're fitting in with the masses.

Remember that Apple TV commercial when they launched the Mac? The 1984 one where the young blonde launches a sledgehammer at the screen - everyone else in that room is just marching and watching the screen - that's everyone else when they write their corporate waffle on Linkedin - if you want to be the blonde girl (metaphorically) launching your sledgehammer at the screen - writing will get you there.

(For reference, as I'm not sure how niche I just went - you can watch the video here)

There’s this strange relief that comes when you stop pretending to be an expert and just start being a person online - the writing became less about answers and more about honesty. You care less about proving what you think you are and become more obesessed over processing what you're already doing.

And that’s when it becomes real.

// The Now

For me, The Clique isn’t a newsletter anymore - it now feels (thanks to Marks ChatGPT/XML sitemap thing) like a timeline of growth, mistakes, and moments that felt like small rebirths all put together on a page over several years.

It’s where I’ve been allowed to test who I am in public, experimenting with writing styles - and learned that the only way to keep doing this is to stay human.

When I started writing this blog, AI wasn't really a thing (ooooh, look at how far we've come) - and slowly but surely, it's become a 'thing' - I say 'slowly but surely' but actually I mean yesterday, the whole AI thing has jumped into the chat and hasn't really left but what that has meant is that there has been a deluge of 'writers' who start their journeys in completely the wrong way.

They're all using ChatGPT to get the content out and get the stuff written but that's not the way to do it.

If you want to be more human, you have to go through the pain of not knowing what to write for WEEKS but still writing - I found myself at one point writing about the fact that I didn't have anything to write about, I was literally scraping the bottom of the barrel of inspiration to keep going but at no point did I throw the creative part of my brain into ChatGPT and ask it to 'write me a blog' - never.

And I don't want you to either - it's not worth it.

Don't do that drug kids - and it is a drug because once you're hooked on it, you're hooked and you won't want to get off it.

You have to get to the stage where some weeks the words spill out like they’ve been waiting and then hit the other weeks, where it’s like dragging a net through mud but every time you sit down to write, you have to remind yourself why you started - because I do - I write because I want to get better and I know feel that when I write it has become the place where I hear myself think.

I never wanted to chase algorithms or inflate reach, it's probably why I don't promote the blog as much as I should - The Clique is named just that for a reason - I wanted a small group of people around me - I want to protect the integrity of this thing — keep it small, keep it honest, keep it alive.

This has never been about growing faster. It’s about growing deeper and sharing things with you.

// What's Next?

I still don’t know what the next hundred posts will look like, it's an evolution for me - a way to keep experimenting and I now know probably 4 weeks in front of where I am at in any given week - it's never a long term outlook but I know that I want to play again.

I want to keep this as an experiment and maybe we bring back a little of the chaos that used to scare me when I first started or help someone else get their first step onto this ladder. (I now think of myself as the parent telling their kids to save to get onto the property ladder..)

I will continue to write about creative work, and my family, patience, frustration, joy because they are all human emotions which connect with the reader.

I want to share the scenes that usually stay off-camera, out of sight and away from any 'normal' story.

Ultimately, I want to continue to make things that feel like a conversation — not content.

I promise that I will carry on making things - keeping everything that the Clique is 'human' in a world that’s automating everything and in a world where there are a shit ton of AI inspired writers.

I will continue to write like I’m still figuring it out - because I am, we all are.

The early posts were all about progress, the newer ones are about presence.

And I guess that’s the evolution.

Not becoming a better writer.

Just becoming a truer one.

Because I love how ChatGPT summed it all up in it's summary of my writing -

"You’re someone who has chosen connection, craft, and honesty over scale, shortcuts, and performance – and you’re documenting that choice in real time so other people have a braver template to follow."

Now it's your turn.