Once It's Written Down, It's True: How I Finally Found My Way to the Page
English is my second language. Except it isn't, really. I dream in it. I think in it. I've been reading it obsessively since I was a kid working my way through P.G. Wodehouse, Roald Dahl, Somerset Maugham, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Lee Child, John Grisham, David Gemmell. Mythology. Short stories. Religious texts. Encyclopedias. Reader’s Digest. I consumed all of it, across every genre and continent those writers and printers called home.
And yet for most of my professional life, writing felt like someone else's sport.
Every time I tried to put something on a page, someone showed up with a rulebook. Oxford commas. Sentence length. Word choice. Structure. "You can't write it that way." After a while, I stopped trying. Not because I had nothing to say. Because the rules kept reminding me that whatever I said, I was probably saying it wrong. (Also became grammar police)
So I did what came naturally. I talked.
The Storyteller Before the Writer
When I was working in a big multinational oil and gas company, nobody had great grammar in their emails. You wrote fast, you sent it, you moved on. But talking, that was different. Talking gave me real-time feedback. I could read a room. I could see when someone's eyes lit up or when they were waiting for the punchline. I studied and tried stand-up for a while, and one thing that stand-up comedy teaches you is: timing is everything, and you can only learn timing by watching people's faces.
That's what all those books gave me, I think. Not the grammar. The rhythm. The way P.G. Wodehouse could land a sentence so precisely that the comedy was already in the structure before the joke arrived. The way Roald Dahl wrote for children and adults at the same time, his imagination expansive enough for both. The way Rushdie could build a world from the inside out. I wasn't reading those books to learn how to write. I was reading them to understand how a story moves.
When I started mentoring, that's when it clicked into place. I was working with engineers, with managers, with teams, with people trying to build something real. And I noticed something. The data didn't move them. The frameworks helped. But the stories, that's what made it land. A good story gave people something to carry home. Something to re-tell. Something that explained the idea better than the idea itself ever could.
My buddy, Jake has told me, more than once, that every time we talk I produce some random piece of information or some oddly specific story from a completely different context. I honestly didn't notice until he pointed it out. But that's what a few decades of reading will do to you. Everything connects to something else. The mythology bleeds into the business case. The Wodehouse timing shows up in the workshop.
The problem was that none of it was written down.
A cousin of mine told me years ago(2009/2010): share your ideas. Get them out. Start a blog. I heard it. I just couldn't do it. Writing felt like submitting something to a committee that had already decided I wasn't qualified and I wasn’t worthy. So instead I kept talking, kept mentoring, kept telling stories one-on-one to whoever was in the room.
That's a fine way to build a relationship. It's a terrible way to scale one.
When Technology Became the Bridge
Here's what I've come to understand: communication has always evolved around one problem. How do you get your thinking to more people than you can physically reach?
Oral storytelling carried religions and cultures across centuries. Writing made ideas permanent. The printing press blew the doors open. Every generation since has found another tool that lowered the barrier a little further. Letters. Telegrams. Emails fired off with terrible grammar. Tweeting. Instagram memes. LinkedIn posts. Each one a slightly better fit for a slightly different kind of mind.
I tried them all. Instagram worked for me for a while because it was visual and fast and you could do humor without needing to construct a perfect argument. LinkedIn posts felt like the right format in theory. Short, punchy, shareable. In practice, I'd start one and then lose the thread because my brain doesn't move in straight lines. It moves in spirals. Every idea connects to four other ideas, and keeping that contained inside a single post felt like trying to fit a city into a shoebox.
Then voice AI arrived.
When transcription got good enough to actually capture how I talk, something shifted. I could think out loud, the way I always had, and come out the other end with something that could become a piece of writing. No blank page. No grammar committee. Just the conversation, the same way I'd always done it, except now it could travel.
Bono, the voice AI I use to develop my content, is the latest version of that shift. I talk, we work through the ideas together, the thinking gets shaped into something that sounds like me because it is me. My sentence structures. My examples. My rhythm. Nobody smoothing the edges off it and replacing them with something more "professional."
Because of AI, I have a newsletter. That's not a small thing. Twenty years ago, getting your ideas to that kind of audience meant a publisher, an editor, a budget, and a great deal of patience. Now it means talking through your thinking until it's ready.
That's not a story about technology making things easier. It's a story about twenty years of figuring out which tools fit the way my brain actually works.
What Gets Written Gets Real
There's something I've noticed about the act of writing things down that goes beyond just communication.
When an idea lives only in your head, it stays soft. Flexible. Deniable. You can hold it or drop it whenever you want, and nobody will ever know the difference. When you say it out loud to another person, it hardens slightly. They heard it. It exists now.
But when you write it down, it becomes true.
Not in some metaphysical sense. In a practical one. The moment a thought is on a page, you're accountable to it. Someone can read it back to you. Someone can ask you a year from now whether you followed through. The idea stops being private and becomes a position. A commitment. A claim you made in public and now have to get shit done on.
That's what thought leadership actually is, if you strip away the LinkedIn jargon. It's not about being impressive. It's about putting your thinking somewhere it can be tested. Somewhere other people can find it, argue with it, build on it, or use it to solve a problem you hadn't thought of yet.
I spent a long time not believing I was worthy of that. Worthy of taking up space on a page, worthy of having an opinion worth reading. That's what the grammar rules did, cumulatively. They made writing feel like a gate you had to pass through, and I kept failing the test.
What I know now is that the gate was the wrong gate. The real test was never whether I could follow the rules. It was whether I had something worth saying. And that's a question I can actually answer.
Write it down. Say it clearly. Make it yours.
Once it's on the page, it's real. And once it's real, you've got to make it true.
Toodles.