Writing publicly...

I have done a fair amount of writing over the years.

In high school, I was editor of the school newspaper. In college, I found myself enjoying writing courses like philosophy and ethics more than programming or math courses (much to my surprise).

I have written business plans for startups, performance reviews for hundreds of people over 20 years and too many of the semi-famous only in tech circles Amazon 6 pagers. I write lengthy and thoughtful multi-draft emails at least once a week for companies I am helping or people I am mentoring.

I have also written privately for myself for years. Future plans, stock predictions, technology predictions, various type of post-mortems and even letters for my kids for when they are older.

What I didn’t realize until two weeks ago was that writing publicly was way, way, way harder for me.

My goal for 2026 is to write 100 pieces publicly. Two pieces a week.

I knew it wasn’t a small goal as I believe I have written exactly zero public pieces content in the age of the infinitely search and forever archivable Internet. But the time had come to stop spending countless days in Claude Code and write some actual content for people.

15 days later, I have 9 essays all in various states of “done-ness” all of which I can’t seem to press publish on. (I started two more while writing this post.)

As the hours and minutes wind down to the work week, I told myself I will publish something today. Even if it is the worst written, terribly conceived concept of a piece of writing. I will wear it as a badge of honor and shame. Rarely is the first time you do of anything particularly good when you look back at it.

So with 11 minutes left to go the only thing I could work up the courage to write was that I was going to write publicly this year.

So at least I can count this week’s goal accomplished.

99 pieces to go.