This past Wednesday, I was having lunch with an artist-turned-VC. And as you might imagine, we had to cover every topic at the intersection of art and startup investing. But of all the ground we covered, one stood out — content creation.
She’s on the Gram, LinkedIn, and everything in between. (Although surprisingly not on Twitter.) But to help her focus, she uninstalls those apps on her phone. Otherwise, she says she’ll end up “doomscrolling.” I get it. In fact, many of my friends and colleagues have shared similar things as well. But…
I’m weird. At least among my friend group, I’m really weird. I’m terrible at social media. I’m an 80-year old stuck in a 27-year old body. At least on the social media front. I find it so hard to keep my attention on social. In fact, I schedule ten minutes three times a week to hold myself accountable to be on LinkedIn and Twitter.
So, when it came to sharing my thoughts and learnings publicly, it was a pretty easy decision. Of course, I eventually came to self-rationalize it as the ability to own my own piece of virtual real estate, but there are three more reasons I chose blogging rather than tweeting or social posting.
1. I write to think
I’ve written about this before so I won’t elaborate in length on my own rationale here, but share a few examples of others also holding it in high regard.
There’s only so much you can flush out in just 280 characters, or over any short post. And while some of my thoughts fully flushed out may only be that long or less, not having that restriction gives me peace of mind to not hold back.
One of my favorite George Orwell lines happens to be: “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well. And if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
On that same wavelength on writing, Jeff Bezos makes Amazon execs write six-page memos. In most companies, team members often resort to PowerPoint presentations. Take anywhere between five and ten slides. Maybe less, maybe more. It’s much less thought out than a six-page dissertation. As Bezos says, “The reason writing a ‘good’ four page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20-page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what.”
Equally so, it’s the same reason the best investors write memos for their investment decisions. My favorite public ones are Bessemer’s, which encapsulates much of their thinking at the time in amber. Turner Novak also turned his ability to write great memos to eventually raising his fund, Banana Capital. And the great Brian Rumao writes memos not just pre-investment, but also in his post-mortems where he gathers his learnings.
While I won’t go as far as to comparing myself to the afore-mentioned, I do find great pleasure and great learning from putting words on paper.
2. Longer feedback loop
My writing is more often a form of self-expression, self-curiosity, and self-discovery. So, unlike a product manager or founder who’s relentlessly testing and iterating on feedback, I enjoy longer feedback loops. I may start another content engine at some point that is for a particular audience, focused on feedback and iteration. But this humble piece of virtual estate will stay me. With no algorithm conditioning my attention span and yearn for external validation. That’s not to say I won’t ever (or have not ever) written things that you my awesome readers want, but it is only at the intersection of what you want and the what I enjoy writing about and asking others about that mint content here.
I also spend a lot of time thinking about audience capture, a term Gurwinder brought to my attention in an essay he wrote about Nikocado Avocado, which I also touched on in an essay I wrote near the end of last year.
I’m reminded by something Gurwinder wrote a few months ago about the perils of audience capture. In it, he shares the story of Nikocado Avocado, who lost himself to his audience, in a section of that essay he calls: The Man Who Ate Himself. He also shares one line that I find quite profound:
“We often talk of ‘captive audiences,’ regarding the performer as hypnotizing their viewers. But just as often, it’s the viewers hypnotizing the performer. This disease, of which Perry is but one victim of many, is known as audience capture, and it’s essential to understanding influencers in particular and the online ecosystem in general.”
3. The impermanence of social media
Most things on social media are ephemeral in nature. It’s designed to capture the moment, but not chronicle the moments. On Twitter, you can only pin one tweet. On Instagram, you can pin three. And on LinkedIn, only three are visible on the featured carousel, and include, five max before it takes you down another layer of friction to discover more.
There’s a level of impermanence which makes thoughts feel whimsical rather than evergreen. To use a phrase I recently heard Tim Ferriss use, the “durability of the signal seems to wane so quickly.” And that made my thoughts feel cheap.
That’s not to say every post I write has their weight in gold, but the searchability and the evergreen nature of my favorite blogposts (saved in my “About” tab) are the reasons I keep most of my thoughts here.
Photo by Fiona Murray on Unsplash
#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.
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