I just got educated

Again

It’s not a bad thing

It sounds like a bad thing

It’s actually my goal

Each day, if I don’t learn about a new thing, it’s blegh

This means being uncertain

This means I don’t know

But I’m wading through knowledge that’s new to me

Even after decades of experience

I still don’t know so much

And I love learning something new

Sure, I know stuff

And I use my knowledge to earn a few shekels

Which can be fun because when I teach, I always end up learning stuff

This week I learned a big one

I saw some content by another content creator on Substack

He has a far bigger subscriber base than me

Is Younger - most are

Way cooler - most are

And he put out this content, which I thought was fantastic

Ticked all the boxes

Anchored the dry knowledge in a cool metaphor

Created a functional funnel selling a great product

And then, after a few days

I noticed the needle hardly moved on the likes and comments

Now, we know we always value comments

But it was feeble

So I got Claude to do a deep dive on the dude

Someone who I thought had a cool and froody, thriving biz

Claude was scathing

And handed me the data

Made accurate conclusions

“Computer says no” - points if you guess the TV show

The guy didn’t have a business

The digital product he was selling could be knocked up with AI in a week

There was no moat

I keep hearing about this moat

I assume it’s a defensible product

Moat sounds cooler

What I learned was that the focus of a digital product should be on the moat and how effective it is, before you do any of the cool coding stuff

I know, I know, we all just want to jump in and build stuff

A brand can be a moat

Which of course, is our relationship with our audience and potential client base.

And their relationship with us

Do you really know

What do you have that’s different?

C’mon, there must be something

When sitting with a potential client

It’s often a therapy session

Digging down to see what differentiates them from others

Everyone has something

But only a few recognise it

And a lot of people fear showing it

They have prejudice

What differentiates me:

• Cornwall

• Experience

• Photography

So I lean into those, I bang on about them far too often for my liking. But it sticks

I post a daily morning photograph, usually of Cornwall

I mention the “old days” and the shenanigans I used to get up to, although I leave out the fruitier stuff

My photography is at a level people like to see

This may be enough for people to hold in their minds an image of me and a feeling which resonates

This is brand building

I say I’m a writer

But that’s just the tool I use to plant ideas and emotions in people’s minds

Which is what good writers do

The reason we write

Is to communicate

But what do we choose to communicate?

Well, my coffee has run out, so we shall have to end it there

I would love to know what you thought of these ideas

Drop a comment and be on your way

What is the worth of a word?

I put down the phone. I had just placed an order for 500 articles, 300 - 500 words, the cost was $1 per article. The writers I employed lived in the Philippines and Vietnam.

The writers were perfect for the task, but needed to be directed and checked, and a complete writing plan had to be in place.

The online marketing space 15 to 20 years ago was quite different. Google had created a landscape that rewarded a specific kind of marketing, and it wasn’t based on quality. SEO content was all about keywords and a mass of content. Oh, and links. More on that later.

Now it’s clickbaity ads on Facebook and shiny, vapid, moronic influencers on Instagram and TikTok.

Dance, monkey boy, dance.

As the SEO world gasps its last, death rattle, they are pinning their hope on gaming AI, so their low-quality, vitamin-supplement client can get a few clicks from warmed-over content served up by Sam Alton at the last-chance saloon.

The creativity back then was in the links. We tried any which way to get links, to influence, to persuade. They were the real currency.

Back then, if you had a well-read blog and you could skirt around Google’s hound dogs sniffing for paid links, you could make a whole lot of dough.

My speciality was creating content to get links.

I employed tactics learned from other disciplines, neuroscience, street sellers, carnival barkers, anthropology, behavioural science, etc.

Copywriting techniques too, planted straight into a piece about the Top 10 Sheds for the Organic, Urban Gardener, the main thing was always to engage, to get them to read the next line.

Psychographic profiling too, we even studied spycraft, I’m not joking. It was all about persuasion. Sometimes one specific person, one piece of content, would exist to get the attention of one person whose link would result in others giving links and a massive boost to a client’s rankings in Google.

But the writing always had to be good, better than good. It had to be read, engaged with. It needed to get the reader to react in the form of dropping a link.

I was so good at it I was called the master linkbaiter in the industry.

I was invited to speak at international marketing companies; blue-chip, massive corporations would headhunt me, offering bags of cash to help them out. Crazy days.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t too good at the business end, or even time management.

I burned out eventually.

The market moved on, and now it’s different.

Plus, people now understand the techniques. You go on Insta these days, and you get bombarded with lots of glossy videos of fresh-faced people with perfect hair and teeth, expounding how they found the secret to online marketing.

In my day, the marketers were a lot uglier.

However, let’s bring this back to today.

What the hell is happening right now?

Because here’s the thing that most people miss.

Human beings have not changed their brains in the last 100,000 years, at least that’s what the science people tell me.

We still make decisions in the same way. This has not changed.

AI is increasing the interest in human-created content, whilst at the same time consuming high-quality content created by humans using AI.

It’s clear that AI cannot create on its own, and even if it did, the human brain would go for that 1% that stands out from the rest of the 99% AI-created content.

I can’t prove that, the data is not in yet.

But the skilled, highly trained human, a master at their craft with AI, will always beat the stupid, uneducated person with AI.

This is a claim I am making, it’s an opinion. We don’t yet have the data for this to be clear.

We are getting bits though, and my instinct says that those with a specific set of skills are going to dominate the next 5-10 years.

And this is what my newsletter, “Squeeze the Juice”, is all about.

Just so we’re clear on that.

What I am saying to you here, just so we are clear about it. The humans will win.

But it will be humans who are at the top of their game. The middle will be gone. It will be the top 1%

It will be those who can think in such a way that it will seem like magic.

What are the attributes of these people?

Outsiders, weirdos, neurospicy, rebels, dreamers, misfits, troublemakers…

Actually, it’s easier if Richard Dreyfuss tells you.

We are back in that place where an individual can cause big change.

You now have the tools to do something amazing.

I feel a little emotional as I write this. Obviously, this text is not AI and has been written as a stream of consciousness with no structural planning and only a light edit.

But yes, I think this is a wonderful time.

I think it’s up to those of us who have earned this gift to go out and do something remarkable.

Sure, you can make a load of money, but what are you gonna do with it? Eat it?

I’m speaking to the rebels here.

In the film Wild One, Marlon Brando played the motorcycle gang leader, Johnny Strabler.

A young woman asks him, “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” and he replies, “Whatdaya got?

Well, what have they got?

Creative burnout can be particularly challenging for technical writers, who often need to maintain clarity and precision while also keeping their work engaging. Here are some mental exercises and strategies to help prevent or alleviate creative burnout:

1. Diverse Reading:

Broaden your reading materials beyond just technical documentation. Dive into fiction, poetry, or non-technical articles. This can give you a fresh perspective and inspire new ways to approach your writing.

2. Mind Mapping:

Before diving into a topic, create a mind map to brainstorm ideas. This can help you organize your thoughts, identify potential sub-topics, and reveal connections between different pieces of information.

3. Free Writing:

Set aside time daily or weekly where you write about anything without editing or censoring yourself. This can help stimulate creativity and free your mind from the constraints of technical writing.

4. Breaks and Downtime:

Ensure you’re taking regular breaks. The Pomodoro Technique, for instance, suggests working for 25 minutes and then taking a 5-minute break. These short breaks can help refresh your mind.

5. Visualization:

Close your eyes and visualize the topic you’re writing about. This can help you see connections or aspects you might have overlooked.

6. Physical Activity:

Engage in physical activities such as walking, jogging, or even just stretching. Physical movement can boost creativity and help break the monotony of sitting at a desk.

7. Meditation and Mindfulness:

Regular meditation can help in reducing stress and increasing focus. Mindfulness exercises can also help you stay present and attentive to your writing.

8. Change of Scenery:

Sometimes, just changing your workspace or environment can spur creativity. Consider working from a cafe, park, or another room in your home.

9. Collaboration:

Discuss your work with colleagues or friends. They might offer a fresh perspective or suggest a new angle to approach a topic.

10. Continuous Learning:

Attend workshops, webinars, or courses. Learning something new or brushing up on the latest techniques can reignite your passion.

11. Limit Multi-tasking:

Try to focus on one task at a time. Multi-tasking can split your attention and drain your creative energy.

12. Engage in Creative Outlets:

Try painting, drawing, playing a musical instrument, or any other creative activity. Engaging in different creative outlets can cross-pollinate ideas and revitalize your technical writing.

13. Set Boundaries:

If you’re always on-call or constantly checking emails, it can be draining. Set specific work hours and stick to them.

14. Reflect:

At the end of each day or week, take some time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished. Recognising your achievements can motivate and inspire you.

15. Stay Curious:

Ask questions, be inquisitive, and remain curious about the subjects you’re writing about. The more interested and invested you are in a topic, the less likely you’ll experience burnout.

Lastly, remember that it’s okay to seek help if you’re feeling overwhelmed or persistently burnt out. Consulting a professional or counselor can offer coping strategies and insights tailored to your individual needs.

There is a genre of advice that goes like this. You have not run out of ideas. You have stopped paying attention. Look around. Notice more. Ideas are not invented, they are observed.

It is reassuring. It is popular. It is also aimed at the wrong problem.

Nobody is short of ideas. Open your notes app. Scroll. There they are, forty of them, sitting in the dark like unopened post. You did not lose the ability to notice things. You lost the ability to tell which of those forty is worth a week of your life, and you lost the nerve to back the one that is.

Supply was never the constraint. Grade was.

Ideas are free. Good inputs are not.

Every creative bottleneck gets misdiagnosed as a supply problem because supply problems have easy solutions. Buy a notebook. Set a capture habit. Collect.

But look at what the collecting method actually produces. It produces commentary. Observations about the week. Reflections on a conversation. A neat reframe of something someone said on a podcast. All of it true, none of it earned, and almost all of it interchangeable with what four hundred other people published the same morning.

That is not a failure of noticing. It is the predictable result of noticing the same things as everybody else.

Here is the rule the advice leaves out. **The value of an input is roughly proportional to what it cost you to get.** Free inputs make free writing. The feed is free. Your own opinions are free. A quote you liked is free. Anyone can pick those up walking past.

Inputs that cost something are different. They are scarce by construction, because most people will not pay.

The five grades of inspiration

Not all raw material is the same material. Rank it by extraction cost and by how many other people have access to the same seam.

• Grade one: ambient.** Whatever came down the feed. Free, instant, and shared with millions. Produces convergent takes. Recognisable because you could have written it without leaving the chair.

• Grade two: conversational.** Questions people ask you. Arguments at dinner. The group chat. Better, because it is semi-private and unindexed. The flaw is that it is reactive. Build a whole body of work from inbound questions and you become a help desk, shaped entirely by whoever shouted loudest this month. Note also that people who ask questions are not representative. They are the unusually engaged or the unusually lost.

• Grade three: autobiographical.** Your mistakes, your lessons, your scars. Genuinely unique. The catch is that you already know all of it, which means you are drawing down a fixed reserve rather than generating anything new. Most people burn through their good stories in eight months and then start dressing up small ones.

• Grade four: primary.** Contact with reality that most of your readers do not have. The client project that went wrong in an instructive way. The experiment you actually ran. The number you counted yourself. The trade nobody writes about. This costs time, money, risk or discomfort, which is exactly why so little of it appears online.

• Grade five: collision.** Two unrelated deep inputs held against each other until something cracks. Salvage law and product design. A ship's manifest and a content calendar. Fisheries quota systems and editorial planning. Collision is the only grade that produces things nobody has said, because nobody else has your particular pair.

The advice to notice more is entirely aimed at grades one and two. That is why it feels helpful and changes nothing.

Attention pools, so noticing converges

There is a hidden assumption in "pay more attention": that your attention lands somewhere unusual.

It does not. Your attention lands on the same nine platforms as everyone else's, sorted by the same ranking systems, in the same seven-day cycle of discourse. If we are all walking around collecting, we all collect the same specimens.

Noticing only differentiates when the thing being noticed is not already on a million screens.

This is why the collector metaphor breaks. It casts an idea as an object lying on the pavement, waiting to be picked up by whoever has their eyes open. Most work worth reading is not found. It is built. You take a position, you test it, you hold it past the point of comfort, and you defend it against the strongest objection you can construct. That is manufacture, not foraging.

Eight ways to manufacture better inspiration

Methods, not moods. Every one of these is a deliberate way to raise the grade of what enters the pipeline.

1. Buy your inputs with effort.

Read the thing that is hard to read. The primary source instead of the summary. The trade journal instead of the newsletter about the trade journal. The regulation itself. Effort is a filter, and filters create scarcity, and scarcity is where advantage lives.

2. Read outside the last eighteen months.

Almost everything published recently is downstream of the same conversation. Old books, dead disciplines, obsolete manuals and out-of-print trade guides are not. They contain fully worked thinking that nobody currently online is quoting. A 1954 book on sign painting will teach you more about attention than a thread about attention.

3. Count something nobody has counted.

Own data beats borrowed insight every time. Audit your own hundred posts. Log your own conversion rates. Tally the thing everyone assumes and nobody has checked. Original numbers cannot be paraphrased from someone else, which makes them structurally unbeatable.

4. Take work that teaches you something.

The single richest input stream available to most people is paid work done at the edge of their competence. It gives you problems you did not choose, constraints you cannot argue with, and outcomes that either happened or did not. Writers with no practice have nothing to report. They can only comment.

5. Force a collision on purpose.

Pick two fields you know at depth. Hold one against the other and ask what the first would say about the second. Do this on a schedule rather than waiting for it to strike. Most people have three or four such pairs and never use them.

6. Steal the structure, not the subject.

When you find a piece of work that lands, do not lift its topic. Lift its shape. The sequencing, the constraint, the length, the way it withholds. Structural theft is invisible and it compounds. Topical theft is obvious and it decays.

7. Argue the other side in full.

Write the strongest available case against your position. Not a straw version, the real one, at full strength. Either it kills your idea, which saves you a week, or it survives, and now you know exactly where the load is carried. Most weak writing is weak because the writer never met a real objection.

8. Log the event, not the reaction.

Keep field notes on what happened. What the client said. What broke. What the number was. Reactions decay within days and read as filler. Events keep. And when you review a month of events, patterns appear that no single reaction could show you.

Now reject most of it

This is the half that gets skipped, and it is the half that decides whether any of it matters. Collecting more raw material without a harder filter just gives you more ways to publish something forgettable.

Five tests. Anything that fails two should die.

The dormancy test. Leave it three weeks untouched. If it is still interesting when you come back, it has a spine. Most ideas are excitement about having had an idea, and that feeling has a half-life of about four days.

The stake test. Can you be wrong about this? If there is no way to be wrong, you are describing rather than arguing, and description is what everybody else is already publishing.

The cost test. What did this input cost to obtain? If the answer is nothing, assume your reader has it too, and ask what you are adding.

The search test. Look it up. If the first ten results say what you were going to say, you need a real angle, or you need to drop it. Being the tenth voice on a settled point is not participation, it is noise.

The out loud test. Would you say this, unprompted, to someone whose respect you want? Not post it. Say it, to their face, and defend it. A surprising amount of content collapses at that question.

Fix your input portfolio, not your idea count

Treat inspiration as a supply chain with quotas rather than a mood that visits.

Decide, in advance, where your material is allowed to come from. Something like this, weighted deliberately toward the expensive end:

- Primary work and own data: half

- Deliberate deep reading, mostly old: a quarter

- Conversation and questions: fifteen per cent

- Ambient feed: whatever is left, and treat that budget as a hard cap

The exact numbers matter less than the fact of having them. Without quotas, every pipeline drifts toward the cheapest available source, because the cheapest source is always the nearest.

Which brings us to cadence.

Cadence sets the grade, so choose it honestly

If you commit to publishing daily, you will publish from whatever input stream can be drained in an hour. That is the feed. Not because you are lazy, but because of arithmetic. Grade four and five inputs take days or weeks to acquire, and a daily slot cannot wait for them.

This is the quiet cost of the volume advice, and it is rarely stated by the people selling volume challenges. Frequency is not free. It is paid for out of the quality of your sources.

So pick the cadence you can actually supply at grade. Weekly at grade four beats daily at grade one, every time, on every metric that survives the week it was published.

The real question

Stop asking where to find ideas. You have plenty, and you know it.

Ask this instead. What have I done in the last month that gave me something to say? Where did I go, what did I risk, what did I read that was difficult, what did I count that nobody had counted?

If the honest answer is nothing, no amount of noticing will save the work. You are not blocked. You are just standing somewhere with nothing to look at.

Move.

I know what you're saying

You’ve sent me a newsletter

It’s landed in my email inbox

Yes?

And?

What am I supposed to get out of that?

I can’t believe the number of times I get an email, and I simply sigh “So what?”

I had a great teacher who would say, “everything your write, say ‘so what’ at the end of it. And really mean it.

When a writer writes something, they need an inner critic. Something in their head has to say, “So what?”

The writing process is not nice, it’s not elegant, it’s two hairless cats fighting over half a can of sardines in the rain.

Not sure why they have to be hairless, it just feels funnier that way.

You don’t write to feel good, I’m sorry, you just don’t.

Even if you write the best thing ever, a writer will think, “What the hell am I going to write next? I can’t follow that. I’m done”.

And most of the time, you have nothing, or you start to have an idea, and you see someone has already published a fully worked out version of what you were doing. As if they were able to see into your soul via the webcam you forgot to put masking tape over.

Very hard to finish the idea when that happens. If you are being paid to do it, then you just have to suck it up and do it.

There are the artists, and there are the craftspeople.

The artist wants to create something new every time, the artist does not work to specifications.

The craftsperson is often doing the same thing over and over, getting it better each time. Working to a set specification. They are not concerned with originality, quality of the work is their bag.

Writers are a bit of both, depending on the type of writing you do.

We can learn from both disciplines, but if you are going to be creating articles and content marketing, you want to be about 10% artist and 90% craftsperson.

Your originality should go into the hook, or what I like to call the headline. The craftpersonship (see that doesn’t work, it has to be craftsmanship) goes into the body content. But, you still need to create an original metaphor and story arc, etc.

So what?

Because it’s important to know how you are working, your problem may be that you are being too much of an artist rather than a craftsperson.

Writers need an ego, we need a dream, something to aspire to. In my day, it was Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson or Elmore Leonard. I’m not current with what drives the younger writer.

But the problem is trying to be like those guys, you really should be getting inspired by them and not trying to emulate them. I knew some young writers who thought the way to write like Hunter (we’re on first-name terms, BTW) was to take the same quantity and type of drugs he did.

Big mistake.

Be another you, don’t try to be these guys and don’t be like me and go out and buy an IBM electric typewriter because Bruce Robinson wrote Withnail and I on it.

Ok, that’s it.

Remember.

Always say, “So what?” at the end of every word, sentence, paragraph and article.

Also, don’t do drugs, kids.

A long time ago, in a place far, far away, there was a wood called the Forest of Noobs, where creatures who knew nothing and stood at the very beginning of knowledge lived.
Every creature born in the Forest was born clutching a small grey stone.

It was called a Stone of Not Knowing, and while a creature held it, it could remember exactly what it felt like to not understand a thing.

Where the confusion sat. Which step was missing? Why the simple thing was not simple at all.
At the edge of the Forest was a huge chasm, the Chasm of Knowledge, and on the far side stood the rich and beautiful Castle of Experts.

The castle was full of those who had learned their craft to a high ability. They talked among themselves of the advanced matters of the day, ate the finest foods, and drank the best wines, for their proficiency had earned them vast riches. What none of them noticed was that somewhere along the crossing, each of them had set their Stone of Not Knowing down on the path and walked on without it. A hand can only hold so much. The heavier the knowledge, the easier it is to drop the little grey stone.

Some of the experts would look across the Chasm and watch the hungry Noobs trying to find a way over.
“I don’t have time for them,” some would mutter. Others leaned on their bespoke, carved staffs of magical oak and sighed, “I can’t even remember how I got here. How am I supposed to help these wretched Noobs?”

And they were telling the truth. Without their Stones, they honestly could not remember. They would point vaguely at the chasm and say “just cross,” the way you tell someone the answer is obvious, and the Noobs would stare back across the gap and understand nothing.

But one old expert still had his Stone. He had kept it in his pocket all these years, worn smooth from turning it over in his fingers, and because he had kept it, he could still feel the far side. He stroked his soft, white beard and remembered.

“I know how I got here,” he said. “There is a bridge. The Bridge of Learning. It is guarded by the Twin Trolls, Distraction and Procrastination. The trouble was never the crossing. The trouble is that nobody up here can remember where the bridge begins, because they have all put their Stones down.”

Holding his Stone tight, he could see the path exactly as a Noob would see it.

• Where they would get lost.

• Which troll would they meet first?

• What they would need to be told, in what order, in words they actually had.

So he powered up his laptop, which ran on three magical, hairless cats connected to the network, and he began to write.

In a few days, he had a map. Not the map an expert would draw, all shortcuts and assumed knowledge, but the map a Noob could follow, step by patient step, with the trolls marked and a plan to beat each one. Because he still held his Stone, he had built the one thing the whole gleaming Castle could not. A path drawn from the far side of the gap.

Of course, he charged a toll. A subscription model, with an upsell to one-on-one coaching.

Many Noobs found the bridge, defeated the Trolls, and walked across the Chasm of Knowledge to live in the Castle. And the old man grew richer than any expert before him.

Epilogue

But riches are heavy, and a hand can only hold so much.

One evening, fat with gold and busy counting it, he reached into his pocket and found it empty. Somewhere between the coaching calls and the wine, he had finally set his Stone down too. He could no longer remember the far side. He could no longer remember not knowing.
And so, unable to see the road as a beginner sees it, he climbed into his new Ferrari 488 GTB, drove confidently into the fog he could no longer feel, and wrapped it around the ancient Tree of Mist.

Sunday morning.

Coffee on, seagulls finally quiet after England beat Norway last night.

I sit down to write about clarity.

Which is a problem. Clarity might be the most over-taught subject in writing. Cut adverbs. Use short sentences. Kill the jargon. All true. All inert. You have read it a hundred times, and your writing did not get any clearer.

So let me try a different angle. Not what to do. What clarity actually is, and why it is nearly impossible to see in your own work.

Here it is.

Clarity is not a property of your writing. It is an event that happens in someone else’s head.

You cannot feel it from your side of the desk. You already know what you meant. The meaning was in you before the words were. When you reread your own sentence, you are not decoding it, you are recognising it. Of course, it is clear. It is clear to the one person on earth who did not need it to be.

That is the whole trap.

The far bank

Picture a river.

You are standing on the far bank. You got there in a single leap because you already had the idea. The leap is the thought itself, whole and instant.

Your reader is on the near bank. They cannot make that leap. They have to cross on foot.

So you lay stones. Each stone is a sentence. Your job is to place them close enough, and steady enough, that a stranger can cross without ever having to stop and look at their feet.

Here is what goes wrong.

A stone too far from the last one is a leap in logic. The reader stalls, one foot in the air.

A wobbling stone is a clumsy or ambiguous line. They slow down, unsure whether they read it right.

A missing stone is the acronym you did not explain, the term you assumed they knew. They stop dead. Some turn back. On Substack, turning back means closing the tab.

And you feel none of it. You are already across. You did not use the stones. You cannot test a crossing you did not make.

Complex is fine. Complicated is not.

People confuse the two, so let me be exact.

The river can be wide. You are allowed a complex idea, a long piece, a hard argument. Width is not the enemy.

What matters is that every single stone holds a person’s full weight on its own. The whole can be complex. Each part must be simple.

A reader who understands each sentence can follow you anywhere, across any river, for as long as you keep laying stones. A reader who trips on one sentence stops, no matter how brilliant the far bank. They never find out what you were building toward, because they fell in on stone four.

This is the cost you are managing. Every unclear line charges the reader something: a reread, a guess, a flicker of doubt. Clarity is you paying that cost up front so they never have to.

You are the worst judge of your own crossing

Because you are already across, you have to fake the near bank. You cannot occupy it honestly, so you simulate it.

Three ways that actually work.

Distance. Put the piece in a drawer for a day. You will not become the reader, but you will stop being the author, and that is halfway there. The stones you were too close to see start to wobble.

Read it aloud. Your ear catches what your eye forgives. A sentence you skim past on the screen will trip your tongue when you speak it. That trip is the reader’s trip, arriving early.

Give it to one stranger. Not a friend who wants to be kind. Someone who will tell you where they stopped. Where they stopped is the missing stone. You do not need their opinion on the writing. You need the location of the gap.

If you have no stranger to hand, three questions stand in for one:

• Is it clear what this piece is fundamentally about? Not the topic. The point.

• Is the hook doing its job, or is it just a nice sentence sitting at the top?

• What is the reader left holding at the end? Name it in one line. If you can’t, they can’t either.

The floor, not the ceiling

One caveat, so I am not overselling this.

Clear and boring is still a failure. Clarity is the floor. It gets the reader across. It does not make the crossing worth their time. That is a different job, done with different tools, and a different article.

But you cannot skip the floor. There is no compelling without clarity. An idea nobody can follow persuades nobody, however good it was on your side of the river.

So before you reach for voice, for story, for the clever turn, lay the stones. Place them close. Test the ones you can. And remember that the smoothest crossing you have ever felt, your own, is the one that proves nothing at all.

You are already across.

Write for the people who aren’t.

Taking the Complex and Communicating It in Simple Terms

Your reader doesn’t need the complexity to get it.

They want it as simple and clear as possible.

Clarity is the goal. I’m afraid you are going to have to take the hit with the complex and absorb it, take the pain. Then, in simple terms, explain to your reader.

A good writer pays the cost of complexity. Allowing the reader to experience clarity.

Passing on the complexity you have discovered is not your job.

Your job as a writer is to absorb the complex and communicate in a simpler, clearer way.

Bad writers pass on the complexity to their readers in a vain attempt to appear wiser than they are.

Effortless clarity signals authority for a reason most readers never put into words. The writer paid the cost, so the reader did not.

That feeling, “this person makes hard things easy,” is one of the most durable trust signals in writing. So the question worth answering is not how to write simply. It is how to take the difficulty off the reader and carry it yourself. Everything else follows from that.

The thing in your way has a name

The obstacle is not the complexity of your subject. It is your own expertise.

The economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber named this in a 1989 paper in the Journal of Political Economy. They called it the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, you cannot accurately model what it is like not to know it. The knowledge reorganises your mind, and the reorganisation is invisible to you.

The linguist Steven Pinker carried the idea into writing in his 2014 book The Sense of Style, where he calls it the single biggest cause of incomprehensible prose. Experts reach for jargon and skip the concrete detail that lets a reader picture anything. Not out of arrogance, but because they have genuinely forgotten the view from the bottom of the hill.

Chip and Dan Heath gave the curse its sharpest illustration in Made to Stick. They borrowed a 1990 Stanford study by Elizabeth Newton, who had people tap the rhythm of a famous song on a table while a listener tried to name it. The tappers guessed listeners would succeed about half the time. Listeners named roughly one in forty. Inside the tapper’s head, the melody plays in full. The listener hears knocking. That gap is the curse, and you are the tapper every time you write about what you know.

Simple is not a style. It is an outcome of the process of understanding

Here is the part that flatters no one. If you cannot make something clear, you may not understand it as well as you think.

Richard Feynman built a teaching career on this idea. His colleague David Goodstein recounts in Feynman’s Lost Lecture that Feynman once set out to prepare a freshman lecture on a hard result, came back defeated, and concluded that the fact he could not bring it down to that level meant physics did not really understand it yet. The tidy one-liners attributed to Feynman and to Einstein on this point are mostly unverified, so use the principle in your own voice rather than a fake quote. Clarity is not a coat of paint you apply at the end. It is evidence that the thinking underneath is finished.

That reframes the whole skill. You are not dressing up an idea. You are proving you own it.

How experts actually carry the weight

The mechanics are unglamorous and learnable.

Trade the abstract for the concrete. “Improved efficiency” is fog. “Cut the wait from five minutes to thirty seconds” is a picture. A reader cannot remember a thing they cannot see.

Use analogy to mount a new idea onto something the reader already owns. A good analogy is a loan of understanding. It lets you skip the ten minutes of groundwork the reader has no patience for.

Cut without mercy. Every word the reader does not need raises the price of the words they do. Compression is not saying less. It is making each surviving word earn its place.

Say the point, not the topic. Most writing announces its subject and withholds its meaning. State the meaning.

Then do the one thing experts skip. Test it on a real beginner. You cannot think your way out of the curse of knowledge, because the bias barely weakens when you are told it exists. You have to watch a real person hit the wall you cannot see. The organisational psychologist Adam Grant put the target plainly: “Good communicators make themselves look smart. Great communicators make their audiences feel smart.”

The uncomfortable part

Now the turn, because the honest version of this argument has a dark side, and your readers deserve it.

Clarity not only earns trust. It can manufacture more trust than it has earned. Researchers call this the easiness effect. In a 2017 study published in Public Understanding of Science, Lisa Scharrer and colleagues found that when science is popularised into easy explanations, laypeople grow overconfident in their own grasp and less inclined to defer to experts. The simpler the telling, the surer the reader, whether or not the reader is right.

This is the writer’s real power and real risk. The same craft that lets an honest expert hand over genuine understanding lets a confident fraud hand over the feeling of understanding with none of the substance. Simplicity persuades precisely because it lowers the reader’s guard.

Which hands you a standard. Make it as simple as the truth allows and no simpler. The line usually attributed to Einstein is a paraphrase, but it is the right rule. The job is not to make a thing feel easy. It is to make a true thing feel easy. Strip the difficulty, not the accuracy. The moment you trade one for the other, you are no longer clarifying. You are flattering, and a sharp reader eventually feels the difference.

Why this is the whole game for a brand

For a one-person publication, clear writing is the most durable authority you have. Credentials can be claimed. Tone can be imitated. But the ability to take something genuinely hard and hand it to a stranger intact, light enough to carry, is slow to build and almost impossible to fake at scale.

Every time you do it, the reader files away the same quiet conclusion. This person did the work, so I would not have to. That is why they come back.

Conclusion

Your audience is really the only thing that matters, what they think, how they feel about you. It’s not what you write, it’s how they feel.

Never about the words, only what’s going on inside the head of the reader.

This is what this newsletter is about.

Helping you become a better writer, yes. But really, it’s about helping you provide the right emotions and feelings to your readers.

Yes, we do this with words, the right ones, in the right order.

But we never lose track of the actual goal.

This newsletter will endeavour to do this. To explore, research, learn and to explain in simple terms.

This is my promise.

Lyndon Antcliff

Substack is a scary place.

It’s different to other social media, allow me to use an edgy metaphor.

“It warms you with a toasted marshmallow, and then you feel the hot breath of an angry bear on your neck.” I cut my content teeth on Twitter, in the SEO space. I built a very good account which became like a cash machine. I used it to get clients who needed content which was above and beyond the normal. Corporations like Tesco would bang on my door begging me to work for them, which I thought quite funny.

Because I presented like a sober, dime-store Charles Bukowski, with a sharpened knife for shaping metaphor.

I stood out, I knew how to talk to the marketing people, told them the truth, treated them like a bunch of sociopaths they are, sociopaths who desperately needed my help.

I jumped straight from being a broke poet/screenwriter, living in a Bohemian hole in Notting Hill, on a street where a travel bookshop, a cookbook shop and a brothel lived side-by-side - to being a hot writer who understood this new thing called social media and how you could use it to get links to your website. (And don’t start with the em dashes)

Top advertising agencies were paying me thousands of pounds a day to schlep into Soho and teach their overly pampered teams how to communicate and persuade online.

I found it hard to take it all seriously because it was all very silly. It wasn’t too cutting-edge what I was doing. I had simply taken one aspect of writing and joined it with another.

Juxtaposing black-and-white to get a very tasty contrast.

I think, because most of the people I was working with were activist, lying, scumbag marketing types (I made great friends), they were desperate for a lunatic, neurodivergent wordsmith who would delight in taking risks and pushing the envelope.

I pushed the content link-building thing so far that I became mentioned in a Keynote from Google’s Head of Spam about my content techniques, which were a little ribald at the time.

After that, corporations queued up wanting a bit of this and a bit of that. I realised that these companies were so bereft of creativity and good vibes that they constantly hunted for people who could add a little bit of humanity to balance out the craven desire to make money.

I burnt out it was just…I still don’t really know why. But I lost my taste for the work.

Became a Photographer, drove a taxi, wrote the first episode of a TV show based on Manchester in the late 80’s that had to be shelved for reasons we won’t go into.

I then thought let’s give that world one more go.

Oh, and before all that, I lived on Taylor Street and Pacific Avenue in San Francisco for two years running a dodgy website, but let’s not get the timelines mixed up.

So now I’ve washed up on the shores of Substack and decided to make it a home. But it’s hard.

It’s hard like a sharpening stone is hard.

But this is the only way to sharpen a knife.

People are very intelligent and open here. Much more intelligent than I am, and I don’t say that modestly.

But I’ve always thought it’s best to be the stupidest person in the room. This is the only way you learn things. This is the only way you sharpen the knife.

Currently, I’m writing for and consulting with extremely overpaid executives who wish to juice up their presentation skills and get the skinny on AI, most of these types are absolutely terrified of what’s coming.

Yesterday, I had a good chat with a very good writer and was having fun riffing with her, although I hadn’t realised how good she was until I really read her stuff, and it was both intimidating and inspiring.

And that’s the thing about Substack people, they are really nice and open, but then produce something that is so good it scares your own ambition.

I’m back to teaching, although it’s more coaching than teaching, as it’s always about transformation rather than information. Why spend time having me teach you to occasionally throw in some punctuation amongst your words? Just get your AI to develop a 7-day plan to become a better writer based on past work.

Where I’m good is talking to you about your writing and you as a writer and giving you a teeny tiny idea that is so personal, insightful and unique that it has massive impact when deployed.

I do realise it helps being a bit weird.

I’m weird, so you don’t have to be.

I’m off to eat that toasted marshmallow now, whilst the breath of the hot angry bear raises the hair on the back of my neck.

For money?

Money is only good to buy time to learn, to talk to people, and to experience.

Everything else is just fluff to me.

I understand that it may not be fluff to you. A big house, a fancy car, a big watch… blah blah blah.

But no, that is not my motivation. Is it noble? It just is, let’s not analyse.

What about you?

You want not just money, too, I think. I don’t think I attract those whose focus is simply on the stacks of cash they can hide under the bed. I like to think I draw people to me because they like to laugh, or wonder at something or be tickled by learning something new.

This means I have to create and share something funny, inspire wonderment and teach something new.

Although some of my past ideas, thoughts, and methodologies have helped people make money. Mostly by helping attract people, changing the way a person thinks about a brand or persuading people to take a certain action.

How?

How can you make money with just an idea?

Emotion is the fuel to make this happen, it’s what drives the human and is mostly irrational. Inspire emotion and showing a direction that makes some sense is mostly what you need.

“Do you fear AI will take your job, then buy my newsletter?”.

Is a simple example of showing this and something we see explicitly on Substack all the time. It doesn’t even need to be that sophisticated to work, indeed most creators make the mistake of complicating their message and not allowing the emotion to make that simple action.

The high of finding a creator who shares your problem and shows you the solution to sign up for their newsletter, it used to be e-books and then courses, but it’s the same thing.

And then you never read it.

I still do it, that energy builds up in you and can only be released when you buy.

I know the sales flow, the funnel building, and the call to action. Priming the pump with emotion is what most miss out. It’s a basic sales technique, easy to learn. It’s structural, so it can be applied to different markets.

But, that’s not what you need to learn from me, as it is easily found in other places.

The reason you should read my newsletter is that I look at what causes people to take action. And the interesting thing to me is that it’s not usually what people say it is, and so it’s tricky to research. You kinda have to feel it. If you’re an experienced copywriter, you learn that those who can write a good hook and sales page are the ones who feel it, who can’t quite explain what it is they do and how they do it.

Sure, there is a lot to learn about technique, and how things flow, and the underlying human psychology, but then there is this secret sauce, instinct, the X factor if you will, and that cannot be bought, it has to be earned.

You have to earn being good.

I have sold many coaching hours in the past, and I often notice that most people expect the hard part to be paying the fee, and then they sit back and soak up all the good stuff.

No, that’s just putting on your shoes, you have to walk the miles to get good.

Am I good?

I don’t know, it’s for others to say. In the past, people have paid me lots of money to write, to come up with ideas, to think about strategy. It’s strange, as I probably would have told them for a cup of coffee, as I find this stuff so interesting.

Imposter syndrome is a thing. I have learned to combat this by pretending and just trusting that people are not insane for paying me large amounts of cash for my work.

So, let me not waste any more of your time.

This newsletter will share the things I know and have done to get very high-paying writing gigs. This is something I have done in the past, and there is a set methodology that helped me do this. It can be learned.

But, I warn you. Learning this stuff is the easy part. Digging deep into your soul and getting your engine running. That’s the hard part, and it’s up to you. I know you can do it, you simply need to decide.

So let’s do this.

See you in the next.

I predict future winners will be those who can creatively produce with the aid of AI and yet think in a strategic way.

By this, I mean those who have clear objectives and have a clear plan to achieve those objectives, but at the same time are able to think in original and unique ways, setting them apart from the competition.

The thinking bit, the taste, the culture comes out of the human brain and experience, and not from a mouse click on an AI tool.

What do we know right now?

• Your work-mate has just shown you a video of him riding a dragon, whilst wearing a Mr Blobby suit, tearing through Sainsbury’s, picking up a pint of milk on the dairy aisle.

• This is how the general population, the neurotypicals, are experiencing AI right now.

• Or, your boss now expects five blog posts from you instead of one and you have to make sure the em dashes have been removed, but it’s all AI-generated and it’s simply checked by a human at the end.

The ones who are going to win the future are the ones who are ripping up the AI playbook and going back to fundamentals.

Still using AI as a tool, yes, but more strategically and the creativity coming from the human.

You see, the AI cannot do the “Incongruous juxtaposition of the seemingly unrelated”, very well.

It can’t come up with the famous copywriting ad from John Carlton:

Amazing Secret Discovered By One-Legged Golfer Adds 50 Yards To Your Drives, Eliminates Hooks and Slices... And Can Slash Up To 10 Strokes From Your Game Almost Overnight!

Cognitive dissonance is created in this copy.

Where the brain imagines two things that shouldn’t exist together and it can’t make sense of it. It needs to resolve it. And so the way to reduce that tension from the headline is to read the rest of the copy.

Clickbait used to do that, but wouldn’t offer any quality in the actual copy because it was simply for the click, which these days is not worth that much on its own.

What the above headline promised was something that could improve something that the reader was interested in, and so they were more motivated to read the actual copy and then act on that copy.

AI is very good at presenting you with common mechanics of copywriting, but it can’t do that thing of creating the actual idea that will resonate with your target audience. The best entity to be able to do that right now is a human being who is an expert copywriter or content creator.

But it needs the one-legged golfer, who I think would work very well in a Monty Python sketch.

I think humans are now more valuable than computers.

But only if they keep control of the creativity, the social and cultural context and the taste.

So I’m positive about the future.

And I’m happy for the weirdos out there, the freaks, the outsiders. The out-of-the-box thinkers.

The future is bright.

The future is Weird.

As humans, we have been creating content for a long, long time.

So what exactly are we trying to do here?

Why are you creating that specific piece of content, or writing, or designing for?

• What is its purpose?

• What is it meant to do?

• What is it meant to achieve?

When you are steeped in the subject, when you are fully on board with a situation, and you know exactly what the readers want to read, and the problems they wish to solve. You may not need to start with “Why do you need to create this content?”

The why becomes instinct, but you earn the instinct by asking the question ten thousand times first.

And then answering that question to the satisfaction of the reader.

Experience makes this stuff easy. After countless sunrises of purposeful writing and many full Moons of being a professional writer, I’ve spent time rocking up with a pack of chewing gum and an old sack full of killer words, phrases and ideas. Running those black-hatted baddies out of town.

You learn by doing, by constantly solving the hardened, rocky, grizzled problems that good content always solves.

The following three things define content that works:

1. Attract. The content must attract attention,

2. Engagement. Once at the content, they must continue to consume. This is not clickbait, we want their minds, not their clicks.

3. Reaction. The content must elicit a specific reaction, this should be planned before pen is put to paper (gimme a break, I’m old). Do you need a sale, an email, or a deepening of the feelings towards the brand? As Walter White would say, “What is it exactly that you want it to do?”

It’s simple, really.

Imagine. All you are doing is taking a thought from your head, using content to transport that thought and putting it into the reader’s mind and hopefully receiving an emotional response.

Why do we need an emotional response from the reader?

Emotion releases norepinephrine and dopamine, which strengthen synaptic connections through Long-Term Potentiation. Memory sticks.

The thing is, to get that emotional reaction does not mean that you need to agree with the content, or think it well-made or even like the author. It happens for lots of other reasons, and perhaps we can get into that in another newsletter.

Of course, there are many writerly tricks we can use, like open loops, cognitive dissonance and the juxtaposition of the seemingly unrelated. Many techniques that can help your content work, and these things can be learned. More of these later.

I think anyone can produce successful content, it’s simple.

In this world of AI, we like to complicate the problem and end up going around the houses.

Find what people want, give it to them and make sure they notice it.

Acknowledgements:

Nestle announced, “We’ve always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat... but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally”.

Which of course became the main, “Whacky story of the day” of the day. Established media have to have a “Whacky story of the day”, because there is only so much coverage you can give the Chief Nutter these days before people weep into their grits, (grits are a US breakfast food that… doesn’t matter, carry on) the point being, whilst consuming news you need a little ying as well as the yang.

I have in the past targeted this particular news segment for lots of different reasons, but let’s not go there for this newsletter.

The point is, I found this story out whilst pushing the “let’s go bonkers " button on my mental dashboard, whilst learning Claude Code by building stuff.

I had ended up scraping trending news on Twitter and then dropping the keywords into Google News. It was here I noticed the Kitkat story and thought, “hmmm, people still do newsjacking, cool.”

I had started quite calmly, sipping a caramel coffee whilst vibe coding. Ok, let’s ignore the fact I could write 10k words on the cultural significance of that last sentence as a chap who was raised in the 1970’s.

And I thought, “Let’s start with a simple scraper.” We all love scrapers, don’t we? If you have a moral problem with scrapers, then why are you using AI, duh?

The workflow is simple, download the desktop version of Claude, add the Claude extension to your VSCode, and if you want to go hardcore, start vibe coding in the terminal. I decided I wanted a bit of hand-holding and used the chat interface, which was now in VSCode.

I then installed a .md file from Nate, which, when instructed in the Claude chat, fleshed out the workspace with a WAT methodology, standing for Workflow, automation and tools. This populated the file system with a folder structure that appears to be very sensible.

I then proceeded to get that first scraper done, using my old, crusty website cornwallseo.com, which revealed how long ago I had touched this venerable beast. Next was the BBC, easy enough and then I thought, “What about LinkedIn?” should be easy, right?

Turns out LinkedIn gets hammered constantly by scrapers and has lots of digital barbed wire up, and so it's tricky to scrape. As I am doing this for educational purposes, I am sure I am covered legally, honest your honour.

Then it was Twitter, or X if you’re a little light in the loafers. Which was also tricky, and then I grabbed the trending news and Google News, finding the tasty Kit Kat story.

The point of all this, without having to show my ADHD badge, is that:

• Vibe coding is hugely distracting

• Vibe coding gets you 80% of the way there, the 20% is where you have to get serious.

• Quite a lot of simple stuff can be done quickly in Vibe coding

• I have only just started and produced tasty stuff

• It appears easy, but it’s just paddling in the shallows, you’re not swimming in deep water

Some of you know my history as a notorious writer who used techniques like newsjacking back in the day to get some viral action for some very big corporations and I see that it would be quite easy to build some kind of content tool, which hooks up to trending stories, looks at your branding guidlines and your leads objectives… blah blah, and then goes and fills your website with luscious Jackson content.

Megh

Kinda boring and obvious, although it may pay the rent.

But, I’m thinking there is something a bit juicier here, something deeper, more umami, kinda like a hazelnut Kit Kat.

I’m going to pour myself another cup of Joe and then off swimming, see you in the next article if you are that way inclined.

Lyndon Antlciff

Because the act of writing will trigger the brain to get into writing mode.

When I was a professional writer, a long, long time ago. I would sit at my desk each morning, and the first thing I would do was to free-associate write. Simply dump anything and everything in my head onto the screen. Making sure it read well of course.

Great things would happen, always a line or two would be saved for later as the magic happened.

Surely it’s better not to produce anything than to produce bad work, isn’t stewing in your own juice the way to get things done?

Well, no. Not in this day and age.

Today, you have to crank it out.

But today, I don’t feel like it, so I am writing this. I have no other plan than the title and just letting the words flow and see where it takes me.

My theory is it’s better to enact a bad plan on Monday than to wait for the perfect plan on Friday. Because you have the whole week to observe and digest feedback and adjust for the next bit of content to crank out.

I am not writing Moby Dick here, I am posting conversational blog posts that share my point of view.

I don’t expect this post to be printed out and stuck on the wall above your computer screen. But, I do hope there may be one smidge of really tasty information for you to snack on.

Or that it triggers a tiny spark in your mind that allows you to ignite the furnace and improve your little corner of the Universe.

Absolutely, there is time to create dense, information-rich content. I love that stuff and get a kick out of working on a piece of content for days and that stuff has its place.

But so do streams of consciousness-type writings like that. I was thinking about Jack Kerouac the other day and though he would have killed it being a blogger, although I get the feeling he may have been the type to write a 50,000-word blog post.

I like the idea of Jack Kerouac, much more than I like his writings, he tends to be a tad introspective. But I love that he gave a voice to the beatnik generation.

Anyway, I am going off topic, the sun is rising and I need my porridge.

Note:
This is my “just get started” post/email.
It’s an edited article from my old library of notes.
There are many things I could add, a bit of research, more ways to get writing started, etc.
But I just need to get this bloody Substack started.
3 Years ago, I created this substack and shared it on something called Twitter.

I know it’s self-indulgent and a little nuts and it’s done wrong and it’s making me wanna turn Grammarly off, as it hates my style of writing.
HOW DARE I NOT USE A COMMA WHEN USING “AND”.

Some of you subscribed from when I used to write professionally, yes, the wet and wild days. Now we have AI and…

So I went out and bought creativeworkflow.ai, who doesn’t love thinking and writing about the creative process, and this AI thing is just, well, you know what I’m talking about, right?

No, not every article will be like this, calm down, I just wanna get the blood flowing, and get things going.

The post will probably be deleted from my feed when I come to my senses, as it’s also a test to see how this bloody Substack works.

I promise we will get down and dirty with content creation and AI and pushing the lizard brain. All the good stuff.

Until then, see you later.

P.S. Screw you Grammarly ;)