When you do exciting things, and we all do something that excites us, then life is great! When life is great you have many things to talk about every day - yet most people and projects do a very poor job of telling their stories. And it's not only about stories, in a fairytale or beautiful future vision meaning, but also stories that summarize learnings for ourselves and for those who come after us.
Painful Revelation
In the past 12 months, I've experimented with coaching founders on a commercial basis. I worked intensively with 12 different technical founders, and several mentees. Again, I have seen firsthand how bad almost everyone is (exceptions apply) in telling their side of the story, reflecting, summarizing, and passing on, and how most of these ambitious people think it's a waste of time with nothing interesting to tell. Until, of course, the great breakthrough win of ...(you fill in your blanks)...
I can relate because I was guilty of this mindset, too, for quite a long time. I've started and restarted my personal blogs and blogs of companies I was building numerous times. I was more of a next-great platform junkie than a storytelling junkie, and that was a mistake.
I Was Lazy Too
I discovered it was a mistake the hard way. Years ago, when I started mentoring younger founders and working with VCs or accelerators, the questions were great, but they were fun to answer only like ten times, not more. And I discovered that I did most of the things the founders were asking about; I also did most of the mistakes they were about to make, but I didn't have them documented; I didn't have the details to pass on. It was a pity, but I started writing things down based on the questions I got or mistakes I saw.
Suddenly, writing things down did not seem like "an extra effort," as I thought before, but as an actual time-saver. I could just pass it on to anyone who had the question without extra emails or calls and be done. Also when we got to solving concrete problems, the discussion could be right on point, not starting with explanations and context setting.
I also discovered (or rediscovered) that writing does crystalize your thinking like nothing else. It also builds your knowledge base for the future like nothing else. Especially writing that you are going to pass on to someone else. Even if you never publish anything about your learnings externally, you should write things down and pass them around internally with your team(s) and maybe future mentees. This is especially true for remote or distributed teams. Even with all the daily standups in the world, you will not know or remember everything that's going on.
Let's Do This
Why I am saying this now? Well ...
... because you may know someone who should be doing it but is not - then send him/her this short story as a motivation.
... maybe it is You who should be doing regular reflection and writing down the story of your side-project(s) or company, but you don't do it because you think there's no time or you plan to start when you "will actually make it." - then reread this and start today!
... and I think many projects could benefit from better external storytelling because of the nature of their products or community. If you know anyone,
send them this story as a motivation.
There's something to learn and share from wins as well as failures. Unless you first jot down your hypothesis and then results, you'll never systematically improve. You may accidentally win, but you will not know why or how you did it - and that would be a pity, wouldn't it?
Farcaster and Paragraph are great places where to start with writing and crystalizing your thinking, because they already include very nice community which will provide constructive feedback, suggestions and even advice. No haters - at least I haven't met any - just builders, smart folks and fun memes.
And Sunday (this is published on Sunday) is a great day to start your reflection and put down hypothesis for the next week. Start now!
Let me know what is your experience with writing? If you are writing on paragraph, or farcaster let's connect!
And if you want to chat about apps for PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) that you could use to build your life-time knowledge base, hit me up. Tana, Anytype, Obsidian, Craft, Mem, etc.
I have spent a lot of time in that space, so I'm happy to talk about it any time - and I will send anyone who mints this post (and DMs me) a table with all the apps I have ever reviewed and tried - approaching 60 now!
I certainly hope you will stick around, if you like - bring your friends - and let's support each other!
Find me as BFG (aka BrightFutureGuy) and let's connect!
- on X: https://twitter.com/aka_BFG
- on Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/bfg
- Web3 Magic Podcast on Substack - https://www.web3magic.xyz
