Every project is a post (or ten)

One of the reasons I love talking to people is that I love to try and dig out the interesting stuff they say, that could well be something they write for others. This becomes even more interesting when the person says they “want to write but don’t know what to write about”. A classic among most strategists.

I am convinced that everyone has good ideas in them, it’s just a case of getting them out and giving them some expression and a broad sense of life. But now that most people can write slop with AI, there’s a bit of nuance that is important to add here.

Sure, everyone has good ideas inside their mind. But more importantly, everyone has good lived experiences that are worth talking about. And being able to express those lived experiences is something no AI model can ever reproduce.

The other day I was talking to a fellow newsletter writer, and we both concluded that our writing would suffer if we stopped being practitioners on some level. Why? Because we’d start noticing that our thinking got more conceptual, but less textural. Loads of ideas, but few stories about how we experience them.

In crude terms, I’d much rather write about something I went through last Tuesday, and using that as a way to capture an idea, than simply writing about the idea itself, devoid of context. It’s not only more interesting, it’s also far more defensible vs AI.

So, if you want to write and are not sure what to write about, but you have spent time working on a project of any kind, then you 100% have a post in you about what that project taught you. Tell us stories of the challenges you faced or saw others face, and how you or they dealt with them. It’ll be new for someone else.

Obviously, keep client information confidential, but it’s absolutely possible to write about how you tackled a particular challenge without giving away the crown jewels of what the answer was.

So next time you say to yourself, “I don’t know what I’d write about”, think about the last work thing you did. Chances are, that project has a post in it, or ten. As do all the other ones. Now you just do the maths, sit with those moments, and let it rip.