Where do I find the time to write (and why do I do it?)
Since I’ve started posting on Substack, a few people have asked me where I find the time to write. Nobody has asked me why I do it though. Today I post about both of those things.
[If you have already read this first part on LinkedIn, just skip it. There is more below.]
I used to think it was important to build an audience. If you have an audience about a topic, you have some instant distribution for free for anything you create. Especially if you are creating something where your audience is the ideal customer, that can be a big edge. How much easier would it be for Tim Ferriss to launch an Athletic Greens competitor compared to for you? You don't have to browse LinkedIn very long to find someone posting about how important it is to build an audience in your domain, even to build an audience FIRST before doing the actual thing (which I really think is dumb btw).
I now think the importance of this is grossly overstated, and the main reason is that the map is not the territory, and if you're online you are looking at a certain map. Why does every successful entrepreneur have a huge online presence? Why do so many successful people start podcasts nowadays? It's pretty simple, we're not seeing a representative sample.
There is certainly no downside to publishing content online, but I don't think it's an important driver of success, and certainly not a prerequisite! That begs the question why I still do it. It has to do with ROI. I’m getting something out of it (some return, asymmetrical profile1), and it’s easy for me to do (low investment).
How do I find the time / how do I do it?
First of all, it turns out I am naturally prolific. On average, since I started late July I have posted on Substack 1.89x per week. To do this, I actually have to restrain myself a little bit. Whether I publish or not, I devour information and I have an opinion about everything. Since I started journaling in 2018 I have produced written content almost every day. Still now I publish maybe 10% of everything I write. Although you see a lot of people on Substack who seem to just be posting their journal, I have no interest in sharing too much personal information. The posts I published about moving to Asia in 2015 already felt too self-indulgent to me. But certainly having a super wide range of topics I’m interested in helps a lot. So here is the key secret to ‘how do I do it’: Having no goal whatsoever is the number one enabler for me to write. Apart from asking myself if something would be interesting for anyone to read, I don’t bother with any kind of content strategy. I just have a wide interest, I write anyway, and just enough people tell me they like my work for me to keep publishing.
Because of all this, I don’t have to ‘find the time’. In my journal (I use the amazing Reflect App, in which I’m an angel investor) I have a tag ‘writing ideas’ where I constantly add short notes and links. When I have a pocket of time, usually in the evening, I just scroll through and start compiling my notes into a post. I also have five drafts going at the moment, and this post has taken me several weeks to write. To keep things going across LinkedIn and substack I use basic tactics to get more ‘mileage’, a concept I have ad-nauseum drilled into my marketing teams over the years. The idea is to fragment your long-form stuff into a whole bunch of short-form content. Last weekend I posted a version of this post on LinkedIn . When I published my piece on AI and society, I also split it up into six or seven LinkedIn posts (with some help from AI) and scheduled those a week into the future.
Speaking of scheduling; I schedule everything I post on LinkedIn and here. That means I’m posting stuff at times during the day when I’m working or doing other things. Logic, and my prior experience with content marketing in my work dictate posts should get more views that way. Despite my not having any real goals with this writing, there’s no reason not to follow best practices where it takes no additional effort to do so. There’s another benefit to this. It means that I’m often not fully aware when my stuff is being sent out, and therefore I am much less tempted to hyperfocus on how it does. It’s much more fun to open LinkedIn the next day and see something got a lot of likes versus distractingly monitoring it as it happens.
Why?
The short answer is that I simply enjoy multiple aspects of posting stuff. The writing process, the sense of ‘launching’ that I get from publishing it, and the conversations that are triggered by publishing.
First of all, Writing is good for me, because I constantly synthesise the shit-ton of reading that I do into opinions about how the world works. A lot of my synthesis is half-assed, straight-up wrong, or just uninteresting. Writing it down helps me filter and sharpen my understanding of the world. As someone with a genuine gift for rapid distillation and cross-application of knowledge, but also the corresponding over-confidence in my own opinions, I believe writing leads me to higher quality opinions. There’s also stuff that turns out to be uninteresting upon trying to write it down, and it’s nice to find that out so I don’t have to spend more time thinking about those things. It really is like this:
Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Of course, you can learn a lot about something without writing about it. However, writing about something complicated and hard to pin down acts as a test to see how well you understand it. When we approach our work as a stranger, we often discover how something that seems so simple in our heads is explained entirely wrong.
From Farnham Street
It would have been so awesome, not to mention hilariously cringe worthy if I had been journalling in my early twenties. How funny would it be to read back my thoughts from the many times I thought I had (this time for real!) figured out the world, on one of the long train rides from Groningen to Utrecht.
Secondly, I’ve always had a prophetic streak and a desire to share. When I was 23 I remember declaring that I would write a book titled “this is how it is” (“zo zit het” in Dutch it’s more catchy). What insane hubris. After I left Rocket Internet and moved to Bali I declared I would write a book about my experience. It turned out it wasn’t that interesting after all, and some of the funniest stories from that time are probably not fit for publication anyway. Maybe I was so triggered by the 23 year old ‘life coaches’ I met on Bali because they reminded me of my own hubris 😅.
Thirdly, there are two sides to the Return on Investment, or perceived utility of any activity. As I made clear in the first paragraph, I believe the Return side of writing and building a personal brand is overrated. But overrated doesn’t mean zero. In addition to the personal benefits I shared above, there are also clear external benefits that accrue slowly over time. Opportunities arise, I’m asked to do cool things that further my career, like being a guest speaker at NUS (National University of Singapore) or a mentor at a Government Accelerator.
And as is also now hopefully also clear, somehow it is really not a lot of effort for me to do this. Therefore, for me, the ROI feels quite high!
Having said that, despite not having any monetization or growth ambitions for my newsletter, I do appreciate very much the replies and comments everyone. Please do keep them coming and if you like or dislike something do send me a note. You can just reply to this email and it will work just fine. You can also feel free to send me articles or topics that you think could interest me and some hot take opinion on them might pop up later in a post.
What else I’m thinking about (too much)
It’s 4 November and the US elections are tomorrow. I’ve been following it way too closely for my own good.
has become my daily go-to for polling news. Of course I follow super closely. This is his post of the day which I enjoyed:
My personal money would be on Trump but that might be a mental hedge against disappointment. In reality it’s a true toss-up and it really seems like it could go both ways…. Trying to shut down any hopeful feelings for a Harris victory, but it would be such a big relief if she does win.
I mean that there is a very, very small chance that something goes viral or by some coincidence creates a massive opportunity for me. On the other hand, there is really no downside other than the time spent. So the ‘risk profile’ is asymmetrical with nothing to the left of zero, the bulk of the outcomes just a little bit above zero and a long tail that trails off to the right representing tiny probabilities of big payoffs.