Some writing keeps traveling and I can't predict which

My writing runs in three layers. The blog has the full argument, followed wherever it leads. The newsletter includes additional background stories that weren’t included in the final edit, too private, too sensitive for public release. Social media gets the same thinking compressed into shorter pieces.

What surprises me is not what gets shared. It’s what keeps getting shared.

My most personal pieces – the ones about coping, about being, about untwisting your mind – are still being read and referenced. Years later. People I’ve never met quote them back to me. I meet people at events who mention something I’d almost forgotten writing.

Some of the posts I’m most proud of haven’t gotten traction. The ones that keep traveling are rarely the ones I’d have predicted.

What I would have bet on

I’d expected the tactical content to travel further. Strategy frameworks. Design process breakdowns. UX maturity models and measurement approaches. Useful, specific, and apparently forgettable.

Tactical writing has a version number. The frameworks assume particular tools and structures. Three years later the organizational context has shifted and the practical advice ages with it.

The mental game is different. A piece about losing confidence in a project, tracing a habit back to where you first absorbed it, finding your way through ambiguity without collapsing it prematurely – that stays current whenever someone encounters it. Learning how others have dealt with hardships, to normalize our feelings and find direction to move on, is a different kind of thing.

The inner work endures.

The authored and edited version

We tend to see our role models as authored and edited. The underlying depth of thought, the dilemmas, the fear – all of that stays hidden. We see ourselves as still figuring it out; our sources of inspiration are polished. With glimpses behind that door, we see the human part of development, maturity and leadership.

One piece I wrote, Leadership Roots, asks you to list every leader who shaped you from childhood to today. For each one: what behaviors did you absorb? Which to keep, which to unlearn?

Going through it myself, I discovered I’d copied a smirk from an adult in my childhood – a look that suggested others were ill-informed or inadequate. I hadn’t noticed it until I traced it back. Once I saw it, I dropped it. I knew from the receiving end exactly how it landed.

Coaching clients have told me they worked through the exercise on their own before we ever spoke. That’s the kind of writing that travels.

Writing and coaching

Reflective writing shows a version still in progress, the honest view while it’s happening rather than the polished afterthought.

But writing has its own limits. By the time something makes it into words, it has been shaped. A journal only captures what you are ready to keep. The stumbles rarely make it in while they are still stumbles. The version that would be most useful to someone carrying the same weight is often the one that never got written.

I’ve seen this with my own mentors and coaches. They share personal stories as illustrations of my circumstances. Even when the situation doesn’t match exactly, the feeling does, and that’s what lands.

Coaching is what happens in that gap – the inner work in conversation, reaching the pattern someone hasn’t named yet. The more I write, the more I understand what writing can and can’t do.

Some things get filtered through shared consciousness as remarkable. I cannot predict which. But I’ve noticed the pattern: what lasts is what helps people feel less alone in their struggle.