On the phone yesterday with Lisa Gates, my client and half of the incredible She Negotiates (and an all-around funny, sarcastic, real, candid, whip-smart, humble human), I shared my 100 Blog Posts in 100 Days challenge.
She made the kind of noise you might make when you pick something up and it’s a thousand times heavier than you expected: “aaaauuuuuggghhh!”
I explained: I want to share what I think, stream-of-conscious-like, even when it’s not good or perfect or polished, every day. To write the way I speak, not the way Google says to. To treat my writing almost like an online journal (ohmygod, remember LiveJournal!? Or Xanga!?!?). To let SEO and keywords and pain points go.
Lisa got it. Online marketing and content writing has become so performative, she said. That’s a great word for it. It’s all What’s your why? What problems are you solving? What’s your CTA? I probably sound like a broken record, but it’s not as fun to write when you have a forced agenda.
To this day, my favorite blog – the only one I read regularly – is Young House Love. Sherry and John Petersik started their blog in 2007 to update family members about their DIY house projects – and it grew incredibly from there. I don’t know their backend strategy, but their tone is open and conversational, self-deprecating and humorous, with tons of slang and inside jokes. (Plus, their before-and-after pictures are addictive.)
(And we can’t ignore that they’re both young, attractive, white, middle-class people with straight teeth who write in Standard American English – that MIGHT have something to do with their success.)
Are my tone, my writing, my thoughts, good enough? Here’s what Jotaka Eaddy says:
“There is this idea that you have to be something other than yourself,” Eaddy, VP of policy at fintech startup LendUp, tells Fortune. “Society often will reinforce this idea that something else is better, which then leads you to think that exactly who you are isn’t necessarily good.”
She’s describing imposter syndrome. That’s its own iceberg, but it overlaps here because the belief that what you want or what you know or what you think or how you do things right now isn’t good enough.
Here’s how it goes:
Don’t be ridiculous, my brain says. You can’t just write what you WANT to write. You have to be strategic. You have to address your ideal clients. You have to KNOW who your ideal clients are! You have to solve a problem. You have to do keyword research. What is WRONG with you!?!?!?
Hush, dear, I say to my brain (when I have the wherewithal and mindfulness to do so). Thank you for doing your job to try to help us succeed. But there’s not one way to succeed. Our goal isn’t always to attract clients; sometimes it’s to experiment and enjoy it.
How do great thought leaders develop their great thoughts? By working through a lot of other, less-impressive, thoughts. By practicing. Researching. Trying. Experimenting. Percolating.
I loved reading how Karen Uhlenbeck, first woman to win the Abel Prize (considered the Nobel of math) describes getting to the mathematical achievement she’s known for:
“And I looked at that second equation and I tried so hard to do it, and I could do it with a gap of a couple dimensions. It doesn’t matter too much what that means. I just couldn’t do it, and I worried at this problem for a long time, and then suddenly I realized that you could do it by something very simple called the continuity method, which is technical in mathematics.”
Emphasis is mine. Imagine how many minutes, hours, notes, notebooks, and energy Dr. Uhlenbeck spent on this problem before she figured out how to solve it.
Dr. Uhlenbeck started college in 1960. She won the prize in 2019. Fifty-nine years of work before becoming widely known for her achievements.
I wonder if, or how many times, she had some variation of the thoughts, you’ll never figure this out. This isn’t good enough. You should do this differently. You should try harder. No one will care. Why is this taking you so long? You should give up.
Humbling, isn’t it?
