I think being good at writing is about a lot more than being good at language and structure and mechanics and all. I mean, obviously those things are important – they’re the tools of the trade, I guess. But like any with other art form, I think curiosity and the ability to be observant are more important, and I love reading things written by people who clearly notice things.

I’ve said this before, but I think worrying about creativity is kind of overrated. I don’t think of myself as a particularly creative person. I usually feel like my ideas are obvious and inevitable, and I’m just stubborn enough to follow through with them more often than the average person. For example, one of my favourite projects I’ve done can be summed up by “I took pictures of my street for two years.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about mentorship lately, and I think one of my recent conclusions is that a new mentoring relationship doesn’t really become useful until after the first 4-6 months, because that’s how long it takes to build trust. Sometimes it takes even longer to build that trust. I’m not saying that the first few months won’t be useful at all – if you think they’re completely useless, that opinion is unlikely to change significantly – but you probably won’t be able to go very deep because you’ll still be vibe-checking each other at first.

Substack fascinates me as a platform particularly because it bothers me. There is a type of writer who writes on Substack, and a type of essay that people publish there (yes, I know it’s not a monolith, but hear me out for a second) and it is its own ecosystem for having conversations, and it just seems to encourage a very reactive and online form of essay writing, like if you took Twitter and made it longform and more polished but you could also choose to paywall your more controversial tweets.

“Networking” seems to be one of those buzzwords that everyone uses and nobody can properly define, which I find extremely annoying. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and maybe I can help offer some clarity. I’m starting to think that there might be two types of networking, which I’m going to refer to as “warm networking” and “cold networking”. If you’re familiar with the idea of “warm contacts” vs “cold contacts”, that’s where I’m borrowing this terminology from.

There is a specific type of article, almost always posted on Medium, that is clearly intended to be included in a LinkedIn post for personal branding purposes. I hate those articles. They drive me insane.

You shouldn’t just write because you want to brand yourself, because if you do that you won’t have anything real to say. Figure out something to say first! It is not that hard.

And these articles all have the same stupid upbeat marketing energetic tone. It drives me crazy. Does anyone actually read and enjoy these things? Who are they for?