Write What you Know

// The Feeling

For a while now, I've been following a lot of people online who create content in one form or another. Newsletters, videos, podcasts, social posts and they're the usual mix of people trying to turn thoughts into something tangible.

Repeatedly, my head and my thoughts always turn towards thought leadership - which still feels like one of those phrases everyone uses but nobody really defines - and I found myself admitting something I’d been struggling with for a while - I always feel like I have nothing interesting to say.

Or at least, not the right kind of interesting.

Because when I (and you) look around online, it feels like everybody worth listening to is talking about AI, scale, systems, hiring, growth and the future of work which are all big topics, big outcomes - all very businessy and very corporate and the thing is, I'm not building an AI company, I have never scaled a business to seven figures and I am never going to post screenshots of revenue graphs or giving advice on leading huge corporate teams with multiple layers.

The strange thing is, I didn’t fully realise I’d been thinking this way until I said it out loud - logically, I know interesting is everywhere. I know people connect with honesty far more than performance and I know the internet is full of polished language wrapped around borrowed experience. It's what I actively try to rally against, the idea that you have to be 'successful' to write anything polished because when you spend enough time online, it’s very easy to start measuring your own life against the loudest people in the room.

You begin looking at your own experiences as too small - too ordinary and too unfinished.

Slowly, you stop treating your own perspective as something worth writing about at all.

// The Performance

I think there’s a version of content creation now that feels less like communication and more like performance - a lot of people do it, you watch enough people online and you slowly start absorbing their language, their confidence and their way of framing things. You learn the rhythm of expertise before you’ve actually lived the experience underneath it - how many 20-somethings have you seen online who act, talk and perform like Gary Vee (I've seen a few)

The 'fake it before you make it' mob will have you copying it so that, naturally, you try to recreate it.

They're not trying to deceive anyone but I think they do it because it feels safer to borrow the shape of somebody else’s certainty than to stand fully inside your own unfinished story - I’ve definitely caught myself doing it, copying how people talk, how people act and how they write to try to sound smarter, more authoratative or 'above my status' - i've caught myself doing it and I try my best to not slip back to it.

The biggest problem I've found is that, with imposter syndrome and your own 'self worth' alarm going off, I used to find myself trying to sound like someone further ahead but the problem is, (expecially with those 20-something's) people can feel when something hasn’t really been lived.

There is just a 'vibe' and when they just read it, watch it or hear you - something doesn’t land properly and I think it's because the texture is missing. When I say 'texture' - I think about my young daughter (she's now 4 months old) and her tiny hands reaching out and discovering texture for the first time - imagine you're seeing that and not feeling anything - that's what the soulless content gives you - the awkward detail, the contradiction, the finer details in the moments halfway through where you doubted yourself.

Because that’s the stuff that gives writing/videos/speeches weight - it's not the polish or the intelligence - I think the more time you spend trying to sound like you belong in somebody else’s conversation, the further away you drift from your own voice.

// What I Actually Know

Whenever I start myself down this path of writing about things that I have no business involving myself in (AI, systems, scaling) I actually start to think about how everybody already has a lane worth exploring and I don't mean that in a limiting sense but more in the sense that our lived experiences is probably more valuable than we realise - why are we rushing past it.

I know what it feels like to build something that matters to me, how I construct something, how I stumble/fall and then try again - I know how it feels to have it start to feel like it's resembling the thing I originally thought about.

I know what it’s like to become the most corporate version of yourself and feel quietly disconnected from your own personality - when you're hammered into a space that you're not comfortable sitting in, to sit in meetings, hear yourself speaking, and wonder when your language became so empty - I know what it feels like to outgrow a version of yourself before you fully know who you’re becoming next. That's growth and that's what people love and more importantly, that’s the material I actually have access to.

And thats not because it’s impressive but because it’s true and I think that’s the shift I’ve been slowly arriving at.

I don’t need to force myself into conversations about things I haven’t lived just because the internet currently rewards them - let everyone else suddenly become the expert on AI, the 'market leader' in scale and systems - Curiosity is valuable, but curiosity isn’t the same thing as experience - it's worth way more.

The people whose writing stays with me are almost never the ones trying to sound the smartest in the room - they are the ones who have experimented and tried to create something and then they’re usually the people willing to write honestly about the thing sitting directly in front of them - how they're struggling with it all.

// The Internet Lied

I think a lot of us have been conditioned to believe that experience only counts if it scales - I wrote about it a few weeks back, when I wanted to change my AI partner of choice (ChatGPT to Claude) and the first question Claude asked me was related to what I wanted to scale first - everyone seems to be writing the same stuff and unless your story ends with huge growth, a dramatic transformation, or some clean lesson wrapped neatly at the end, it can start feeling like it isn’t worth sharing - that's what I've been trying to get away from.

A lot of my articles do sound like they're rambling, like they just don't make sense but they some of the writing that’s affected me most has been broad, exploratory or it's been painfully specific - someone describing a feeling I thought only I had, someone writing about a tension I hadn’t quite found words for yet - they're both specific and broad in the same sense - but they're relatable.

That kind of writing sticks with people because it feels real.

And real is becoming surprisingly rare - I've been seeing more and more AI slop generated videos (timelapsed garden makeovers and bunker builds seem to be becoming the AI slop of choice at the moment.

Some writing and video content technically does all the right things but still feels emotionally void - like someone studied what vulnerability is supposed to sound like instead of actually risking any (and thats another red flag for AI generated writing)

I think people can tell the difference and it's becoming harder to gain the attention for being real - like you're a blade of grass in an avalanche - you're being lost in the tumble.

// Write What you Know

So I think I’ve started seeing this differently now - the answer probably isn’t to stretch wider into subjects I haven’t earned yet just because they perform well online, it’s probably to go deeper into the things I already understand.

The things I’ve actually felt, actually struggled through and more importantly, that I've actually failed at because that’s where voice comes from.

You shouldn't try sounding more impressive than everybody else - that's the path to mediocrity - you should stop borrowing the language of people further ahead, just focus on telling the truth about what you know, and the bit's you're still figuring out.

I think there’s something quite freeing about that - you're not trying to pretend, you're not trying to be accomplished and you stop trying to position yourself as the smartest person in the room and start focusing on being the most honest one instead.

There is a great Simon Sinek speech about companies playing the infinite game where not everything is finished, not everything is resolved and I think you should focus on that - don't focus on writing about things you don't know about but instead focus on things you know everything about and if you don't know the answer, be bloody honest because it’s real. That's the point of 'creating' to be real, to show off who you are and maybe that’s enough.

Maybe that’s the whole point.