What if you felt free to write what you want to?

Whose voice helps you share yours? My friend Roman Eggenberger has been sharing his top LinkedIn voices recently. It’s a joyful series. The opportunity to discover people who weren’t on my radar before, hear how Roman met them and how they have helped him write what he wants to write.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about writing recently. Whether I’m writing for the right reasons. Whether I write the ‘right’ things. Wondering why I get excited about an idea but then dismiss it or never get around to writing it because there’s something else I deem ‘more important’.

Am I boxing myself in with ‘shoulds’?

Am I letting my quirkiness out? Or hiding it away?

That’s what drew me to writing in the first place. The opportunity to share what was in my head. What I was reading or listening to, the connections I made and ideas I had.

One of the people Roman nominated as a Top Voice was Mychael Owen who started writing a blog 50odd about ‘not waiting’ when he was 50. I hadn’t come across Mychael before, though it turns out we have several mutual friends. He commented on Roman’s post that at one point he noticed the dopamine hit of seeing which posts got more engagement was affecting his writing. I sympathise with that. I’ve written good posts that don’t seem to get seen, and off the cuff fluff that does. Do I write more off the cuff fluff?

That’s not what excites me.

It’s not why I write.

I write to think. And I write to help other people to think and encourage them to share their thoughts.

One of the people who helps me to think, although we haven’t had a conversation for years, is Roman. We did Seth Godin’s altMBA together. We had to keep shipping. The focus was on getting the work done. Prompt. Ideas. Execution. Publish. Review. Publish reflections.

Roman had a deck of cards with different business models from the University of St Gallen. Idea. How could we execute that? Pick a card. How do we apply it? Pick another card. All change. What if we added that boundary? What if we delivered like this? Ideas. Ideas. Ideas.

There’s no one way.

55 business models. Different markets. Different boundaries. So many possibilities.

You don’t have to fit in a box.

Neither does your writing.

Writing leads to writing. Mychael wrote, Roman wrote, I am writing. Are you? Who will be inspired by something you write and run with it in another direction?

Pick a card. Now write.