Skip to main content

Write Well, Think Well

 How My Focus on Writing is Influencing Everything




For every year that has gone by, I have written more. You meet more people, attend more meetings, work on more projects and balance more commitments.

To juggle all of those different activities, we communicate with each other more than we did in the past. 

A lot more.

It does people a huge disservice. And they don’t even know it.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Jump-starting 2022

It’s cliche, but I decided that I was going to get back into writing. I had first picked it up when I left my job in 2019 and dove headfirst into the professional world of networking.

My weapons of choice? LinkedIn and a personal blog.

To step outside of my comfort zone and showcase my business prowess, I took to writing. I developed a strong habit of posting 1–3x a day on various industry news. My network was growing.

Eventually, I let it drop off. I got busy with a new job and didn’t prioritize it. One day turned into a week, then a week into a month. Before I knew it, I hadn’t written a blog post for the better part of the year. My writing quality was suffering too. My posts weren’t well structured. I got lazy and would make top-level comments based on whatever was happening in the news.

I learned two lessons during that period.
  • It’s easy for the quality of your writing to suffer
  • Habits and momentum are extremely important. Creativity feeds more creativity

What Brought Me Back?

I noticed that I was getting dull. Not dull as in unintelligent (you know what you know about business), but I was missing a spark.

Writing had inspired me. You think about things differently when you want to communicate your ideas to others. You spend a lot of time challenging yourself on the message you want to share — It also helps that LinkedIn has a 1,200 character limit per post! Write it tight.

Having your creativity on overdrive is like a drug. It doesn’t limit itself to your writing. It invades all aspects of your life.

The solutions I would see at work changed. How I would interact with other people changed. The way I navigated problems changed.

It was awesome. I wanted that back.

Leveling Up

I do have a vice. I’m one of those people that doesn’t do something halfway. Not all or nothing. I lean to just the “all” part of that spectrum.

There’s a fundamental belief that I hold onto. It has dominated my life.

When I share it, people often don’t understand. I tell them how meaningful it is, so they’re waiting with baited breath. They want to know what wisdom I have squeezed out of life. We all love our lifehacks, after all.

My big idea is this. Most things in life are less complicated than people make them out to be.

That’s it. Disappointed?

It’s significant because it keeps me from letting myself off the hook. By not accepting that I can’t do something, I don’t give myself an exit.

I do it, and if I’m going to do it, I’m giving it everything.

I’ve applied that mantra to writing.

I have read a few books on how to write well (I now know I used to use too many adverbs!). I have dug into the art of copywriting. My current kick is the magical world of storytelling.

Gaining knowledge, stitching ideas together, and figuring out how to incorporate them into my style. 

I’ve been investing most of my free time into my personal development.

The best part is, I don’t think I’m any good at it.

I appreciate that for some people, that would be discouraging. Change the frame. With the positive impact I have already seen, what’s waiting a little further down the road?

That’s what’s captured my attention these days.

If there’s one thing you take away from this article, I hope it’s this.

Write. More.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This 1 Thing Increases Your Career Capital More Than Anything Else

The Art of Better Decision Making Have you felt scared to make a decision? Maybe you get preoccupied with making the 'wrong' decision?  Did you know that 68% of people have admitted to not doing because they thought it would be harder than it actually is. Getting comfortable with making decisions is one of the biggest challenges new leaders face. You will be placed in situations where there isn't enough time to get all of the information. Or even harder, you will be placed in situations where you'll never get more information than what you have. The good news? Making better decisions is something that you can improve by being deliberate with your learning and how you choose to approach it. This is the approach I take to decision making. These have been test and is what I have used over my 15 year career to teach and develop teams. - Accept that you will make mistakes. There is rarely a perfect answer. Getting comfortable with ambiguity is a leadership muscle you need to...
2 comments
Read more

Your Next Five Moves

 There are two streams of thought when you start reading a book and you don't feel like you are connecting with it. Some people will say to stop reading it and move onto something else, the theory is that there are so many things in the world that you will enjoy reading, that you shouldn't be wasting your time on things that you don't. Camp B will tell you to stick with it, get through it and see what happens. If I had to "pick a side" I probably fall more into team B than team A, even though I do feel that there will always be some books / material that you should just put down. What has me more B than A? Some of the books that have had the most impact on me were a STRUGGLE to get through. I challenge that this may because they are pushing your boundaries and putting something up against your current worldview / paradigms. True growth and learning comes from when you can challenge and dismantle your own ideas, and rebuilt them anew. My first real experience with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Decisions, Positions and Frames

  Making decisions and getting consensus is the most common activity that every person goes through. Whether in your personal or professional life, we are all selling, all the time. Selling? I'm not selling anything! Actually, that's not really true. At the most fundamental level, selling is about the transfer of belief. You are trying to get a person or a group to see things the way you do. If they accept that, you make the "sale" (i.e. you have transferred your idea/belief) as another has chosen to accept it. Where things get hard is when people hold onto certain ideas, frames or positions around a circumstance. It's interesting how little people realize what they share related to their position without even knowing it. The information is there, as long as you are listening. Always be listening. When someone repeats a variable or constraint that is a difference, that has major impact. They themselves they may not realize that they are essentially confirming what...
Post a Comment
Read more