On thinking out loud

I'm a bit out of practice with something, recently — thinking out loud.

When you're in the messy middle of a pivot in your work, I find that the impulse is to get inside your own head, and to end up spending far too long there.

The solution, I believe, is to think out loud: to share what you're thinking with others, while you're thinking it.

But there's a vulnerability to sharing something that doesn't feel finished, or polished, or ready. This is particularly true if you've established a reputation for a certain perspective or kind of work, and what you're sharing represents a fundamental change in direction or positioning.

You start asking:

• Will this confuse the people who are already familiar with me?
• How should I explain the change, and the reasons behind it?
• Will the new work make sense to people?
• How can I make sure it's clear / coherent enough before sharing it with people?

This is what I've been experiencing myself over the last few months as I've been developing Grain — my new strategic advisory and editorial practice — and this accompanying newsletter, The Edge of Expertise.

This post is, in a way, an attempt to break myself out of the pattern I've described.

It also represents a new principle I want to maintain: that one should write and publish first via a channel you own, before sharing it on social platforms.

(I'm putting things in bold that I intend to turn into a linked post, later. A sort of bracketing / a reminder for myself).

In the past, I've had a tendency to just fire off posts on LinkedIn — which has served me well up to a point, but has a couple of serious drawbacks:

1) The kind of writing you do becomes shaped by the particular expectations, constraints, and the culture of the platform. You're writing for LinkedIn — rather than for yourself, and/or for others, in a way that's more open formally and stylistically.

2) The writing effectively disappears. It's kind of like playing pooh-sticks with your words: you watch them float off downstream, and after a few hours (or days or weeks), your post has become lost and forgotten in the infinite sea of algorithmic obscurity.

The more constructive approach is to establish an archive of your writing. Which is what I'm in the process of doing right now.

This post will persist. I can return to it easily, develop it, and indeed re-purpose and share parts of it as posts on social media. Again, it's not an either/or thing — one can have the best of both worlds, simply by introducing ordering where and how you do your writing.

In the spirit of thinking out loud, and I'm going to leave this here for now, and maybe come back to it later...