S2E01: I've Been Hoarding Insights

I stopped blogging for a while. Then I started again, except this time I'd quietly handed myself a new rule. I didn't notice I'd made it. The rule was: only post the good ones.

So now I have a folder. Insights from client work, things I notice in training rooms, half-thoughts I mean to write up properly one day. All of it sitting there. Waiting to become a really nice piece.

It is not becoming a really nice piece. It is just sitting there.

Seth Godin put up a post this week, Perfect or better? One line in it: "The search for perfect never ends, and it's a great place to hide."

That's my rule. "Only post the good ones" sounds like standards. It's a hiding place. As long as the piece isn't good enough yet, I never have to find out how it actually lands.

Here's what I keep missing. A draft is not a saved insight. I treat that folder like a fridge, like the ideas keep. They don't. An insight has a timestamp on it. The thought I have about AI today is sharp today, ordinary in three months, a little bit wrong in six. The post I'm "saving to write better later" is not appreciating while it waits. It's going off.

And the writing doesn't improve in the folder either. It improves by being posted, read, replied to, argued with. The reps are the improvement. I had the order backwards. I was waiting to get better, then post. You post, and that is how you get better.

This used to be a smaller mistake. In a slower world, waiting for the perfect moment cost you the wait, and not much else. Lose a month, you're a month behind. Annoying, recoverable.

That is not the math now. Everything right now is set up to compound. Every post teaches me the next one. Every imperfect thing I ship lifts the floor for the thing after it. Skip the rep and I don't just lose the rep. I lose all the interest that rep would have earned, for good. The two timelines never touch again.

And the waiting isn't even neutral. While the post sits in the folder, I am not holding steady. I'm sliding. The insight goes stale, my read on what's current goes stale, and everyone who posted their messy version is three reps ahead and pulling away. I thought hoarding was saving. It's spending. Quietly, every day, at a rate that keeps going up.

The uncomfortable bit. I see this exact move in client rooms all the time. A team that won't start until the AI is more mature, until they know which tool to buy, until the rollout plan is bulletproof. I have a whole tidy diagnosis for them. Then I close the laptop and do the identical thing to my own blog.

So this is me posting before it's a really nice piece. It's a bit lumpy. I'm fairly sure that's the point. I'll find out.