A selection of writing samples across formats, from short-form social content to longer editorial pieces
LinkedIn Post
On Career Advice That Hasn't Caught Up
I’ve spent years collecting career advice, which led me to finding 3 different mentors, hiring a professional resume writer, buying an interview course, and, my personal favorite, taking on unpaid internships.
It’s not terrible advice per se, but it feels more relevant for an older version of the world where companies lasted generations and careers were more linear. It’s less useful for companies whose lifespan is barely 15 years, and jobs that will exist a decade from now don’t even have names yet.
The advice hasn't caught up. I’ve noticed that the founders and operators I work with navigate this well because they’re not following a formula. They’re paying attention to changes, they remain curious, and they build transferable skills instead of focusing on credentials that impress.
So I suppose it’s worth asking what kind of thinker you want to become instead of what career you want to build.
Short Essay
Why Brand Content Sounds the Same
I’ve noticed that brands that have genuinely interesting things to say tend to say them in forgettable ways.
The unfortunate use of the same sentence structures, the same reassuring adjectives, or the same rhythm that’s meant to show that something was carefully written but doesn’t communicate much of anything.
I think it happens because, somewhere in the process, someone asked whether something sounded professional rather than whether it sounded like them. It turns out that "professional" is just another word for "familiar".
The brands that actually cut through are more specific, not louder. They say the thing they actually think.
You can't build an audience on content that could have been written by anyone, about anything, for no one in particular.
The goal was never to sound like a brand. It was to sound like yourself, consistently, until people start to recognize you.
Essay
What Building an Audience Actually Teaches You
A lot of content advice skips the part where nothing is working.
There's a lot written about consistency, or all the ways you can be memorable in a saturated space. However, there’s less written about doing all of that and watching the numbers stay stagnant, seeing an empty comments section, or the follower count hardly moving while you publish into a void.
I've spent the last several months doing exactly this, trying to build an audience from scratch for someone with incredible ideas but no existing platform. And the thing I've learned isn't about posting frequency, the right time to post (yes, I’ve searched online about ideal peak hours), or the algorithm. It’s how different the work looks without an audience.
When there's no engagement to optimize toward, you start writing for the idea. You figure out what you actually think, because there's no external signal telling you whether you're right. And you end up developing a voice because it's the only thing you have to offer.
This is uncomfortable. Growth hacking gives you something to do. Building from scratch, on the other hand, mostly asks you to wait, keep going anyway, and to resist the urge to change or delete everything based on one bad week (and boy have I been tempted).
I’ve come to realize that accounts worth following tend to have gone through this phase and come out the other side with a clear point of view, because they create something real over time.
I think the empty early period is for figuring out what you'd say if you knew no one was listening, and then saying it anyway, even when the algorithm doesn’t notice you (yet).