I’ve been writing since childhood. Journaling since 2002. Blogging since 2014. The act of writing has never been the hard part — it’s something I’ve always done, something I’ve always been good at, something that’s felt more natural than most things in my life.
What was new was writing personally in a professional context. In public. About real situations, real organizations, real decisions I’d made or watched others make.
Every time I did, it felt like walking on thin ice.
The fear wasn’t abstract. It was specific. What if someone from that organization reads this? What if they recognize themselves? I’d spent years writing in journals, writing analysis, writing business history — none of which required me to put my own lived experience on the line. This did.
What shifted, over time, was the answer to that question. If someone from that organization reads this and recognizes it — good. Either they acknowledge what I’ve written is true, or they push back and tell me I’m wrong. Both are valid. Both are better than silence. I’m sharing lived experience, not filing a complaint. The perspective is mine. What they do with it is theirs.
That transition didn’t happen because I became braver. It happened because I published anyway, week after week, and nothing catastrophic occurred. The fear didn’t disappear. It just stopped being the deciding factor.
The other thing I didn’t expect was how much structure helped. I’d done daily blogging before — three years of it, after Seth Godin’s nudge finally pushed me over the line — and it eventually collapsed under its own open-endedness. Every morning, the same question: what do I write about today? Compounded daily, that question is exhausting. On the days I was just living my life, going through its struggles, I had nothing to observe. The pressure became the enemy of the writing.
This time was different. Twelve weeks mapped out in advance. Each week, a fault line. Each day, a specific angle. I never had to decide what to write about — only what I actually thought. That’s a different problem. A better one.
Structure didn’t constrain the writing. It gave the commitment somewhere to land.
P.S. This is week twelve of a twelve-week curriculum exploring the fault lines that run through strategy, leadership, and organizational life. If this landed, start at the beginning — The Fluff Illusion is where it all started. And if you want the weekly essays that go deeper than the blog posts, subscribe to The Blind Spot — they go out every Sunday.