Well, that phase didn’t last very long.
What phase?
The phase of me cranking out tactical messages on personal branding to you… daily.
Why was I doing it?
Well… Suffice to say I was percussing1, hoping to get a signal.
Percussion is an examination technique I learned in medical school. It means to tap a region of a person’s body in a specific way to determine what’s going on in there.
The content wasn’t bad (right?) but such didactic teaching isn’t how I want to operate. That much is clearer now.
Things had gotten pretty interesting with me, and I thought I’d better be as practical as possible in my writing. Good thinking, but not quite.
A clash with my book coach
I recently started speaking with a book coach about developing a manuscript I’m working on. It’s about my fantastic meandering career and life journey, and especially centered around this crucial question: why I left medicine.
She confirmed that the first draft of the manuscript was rich. She however thought that I needed to make it more topical to readers’ everyday struggles. Essentially, to make it into a step-by-step ‘how to’ kind of book. How to build a personal brand, how to make a career pivot, etc…
I understood that angle. The manuscript certainly needed fleshing out. But I maintained that I wanted to write a story, not a self-help book. I personally find that reading people’s stories uncut has the greatest impact on me. Reading “Here’s how to do XYZ” is so boring, restrictive and not at all guaranteed to work. People are different, and we can’t pretend that the ‘seven steps’ we took to become successful will work for someone else—as if we even know what we were doing the whole time.
This is my editorial philosophy:
Instructions may not always work.
Inspiration always will.
Inspiration is what I offer. It’s what happens when we tell our story without trying to force it down someone’s throat as advice. People naturally glean custom ideas and instructions when they are inspired. All I can do, all I want to do, is share my story. And then see how it lands for people.
An inspirational newsletter, not a tactical one.
The book coach has a point, though. Not all readers get inspiration. Many will need to have things spelled out to them. I understand that. I guess I write for a specific type of person, and that person, like me, doesn’t need spelling out
I’m confident that you are that person, because you signed up for this newsletter without any concrete promise from me. The only thing I promised was to share my journey. That’s high level, inspirational. Thank you for being here.
So I’m done with the practical writing, and back to pure storytelling. Not tactics, just sharing and giving room for inspiration.
What next?
Expect more: dense editions, varied themes, sincere writing (some of them meta, like this one) and more sections that cover my other expressions, viz the podcast and the music (yes!) and more.
Expect less: calendly link embeds, questions about your career, awkward endings, didactic insights.
I am accepting that I do have a lot to share, that you may be interested in hearing about it, and that I am indeed a walking media company.
My top inspiration for this week is that we will find true success only when we give in to being ourselves. Unapologetically.
Cheers to the first weekend in September.
– Taiwo