If you came here from my first piece, Everything Looks the Same, you’ve already seen the output of the thing I want to talk about. That article started as a complaint. Something I’d been saying for years, usually about design, usually with the confidence that comes from repeating yourself in enough conversations. I’d have called it a belief if you’d asked me. It wasn’t. It was a habit. I’d gotten used to saying it.
Then I had to give a talk on trends, and I sat down to write the notes, and the complaint didn’t hold up on its own. It needed a why. Where did the sameness start. Who set the template everyone else was copying. What were the actual mechanics underneath. The piece that came out isn’t the complaint I’d been making for years. It’s what the complaint turned into once I forced it to justify itself.
That’s when I realised how much of what I’d been calling “what I think” was actually just what I was in the habit of saying.
Most people I know think by talking. Conversations with peers, colleagues, friends over dinner. That’s where ideas form for me too. But conversation lets you get away with things writing doesn’t. You can say the same thing three different ways across three different weeks and never notice you’ve contradicted yourself. The other person nods, or pushes back a little, and you move on. The belief stays soft. It feels like thinking because it is thinking. It’s just only the first half.
Writing is the second half. And writing doesn’t clarify your thinking by itself. Plenty of people write constantly and stay muddled. What writing actually does is test whether there’s a belief there at all. You try to put a view on the page and you find out fast whether you can defend it, or whether you’ve just been repeating a phrase that sounds right. The ones that survive the page are the beliefs. The rest were habits you’d mistaken for convictions.
You can feel this in the writing itself. Clear ideas write easily. Muddled ones resist the page. When a paragraph keeps coming out wrong, it’s usually not the paragraph. It’s the idea underneath it that hasn’t been worked out yet, or that isn’t actually there.
This is why I’d push back a bit on the standard take that writing is where thinking happens. For me it’s not. Conversation is where I go wide. Writing is where I go deep. The mistake most thinking people make is stopping at the wide part and calling it done.
Then there’s the other problem. The one that almost stopped me from publishing any of this.
I’m a perfectionist, and the first piece took me six months to ship. Not because I hadn’t done the thinking. The thinking was done, the talk had been given, the notes existed. What I couldn’t do was turn those notes into something with my name on it, in public, where anyone could read it. So I tinkered with the setup instead. Built a Notion-to-pages pipeline. Added versioning. Set up a staging environment. All the things that felt like progress but were really just avoidance.
It’s the same trap I watch founders fall into with their products, and I walked straight into it with my own blog. The advice I give teams is to share early. Not because early work is good, it usually isn’t, but because sharing creates a deadline, forces pragmatism, and gets you input you can’t get any other way. Six months of private polishing doesn’t make the work better. It just makes it later.
So that’s what this is. A thinking tool, not an attention tool. A playground where I work out what I actually believe, in public, because the public part is what forces the rigor. If I were writing in a private document nobody would read, I’d let myself off the hook. Knowing someone might read it is the pressure that sends me looking. That’s the whole mechanism.
The backlog is messy and long. Some of it I’ve been thinking about for years, and I’ll probably write it and realise I was wrong, or that I never really believed it in the first place. That’s the point.