There's a story none of us were formally taught but all of us somehow know.
The genius disappears. Years in a room, alone, wrestling with a problem nobody else can see. Then one day the door opens and out comes the thing — the theory, the novel, the invention — fully formed, entirely his, owing nothing to anyone. Applause. Statue. Chapter in a textbook.
I believed that story. Not consciously, not as a thing I'd have argued out loud, but in the way you believe the load-bearing stuff : silently, and with consequences.
The consequence for me was this rule — if an idea didn't originate with me, I had no right to write about it.
And that rule, applied honestly, kills everything. Because when you check any idea you have against it, you find the idea has fingerprints all over it. Something you read. A conversation. A video from three years ago. Some book you half-remember. Nothing survives the audit. So you write nothing, and you tell yourself you're maintaining standards.
I stopped writing for a long time on those grounds.
The word that broke the rule
Recently I've been reading Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon. They're short books — the kind you can summarize in a line or two and still have the summary land, which is its own kind of craft. And they take a hammer to exactly the story I'd been living under.
Kleon's first move is to point out that the lone genius is mostly a myth we invented afterwards, a tidy narrative applied to a messy collaborative reality. Then he offers a replacement, a word he borrows from Brian Eno : scenius.
The idea is that great work doesn't come out of a solitary head. It comes out of a scene — a group of people trading ideas, borrowing, arguing, copying each other, building on what's already lying around. The person who eventually gets the statue is usually just the most visible node in a network that produced the work collectively. History remembers a name because a name is easier to remember than a scene.
Which is the same thing Newton said, more famously and more politely : if he saw further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. The most quoted line about original genius is a line denying original genius.
So my rule was built on a premise that isn't true. Nothing is invented in a vacuum. Every idea is a remix of ideas it inherited, and demanding otherwise from yourself isn't rigour — it's just a well-dressed excuse to never publish.
The second excuse : "everyone already knows this"
Getting past the originality rule only revealed the next one underneath it, which is subtler and, I suspect, far more common.
Take neuroplasticity — the fact that your brain physically rewires itself, that the thing you think of as fixed is closer to something you can lay new track through. If you've read even two self-help books you've met this idea. It's everywhere. Writing about it feels almost embarrassing, like announcing that water is wet.
That's how it looks from inside my head. Now look at the arithmetic from outside it.
"Everyone knows this" is never true. It's shorthand for "everyone in the small overlapping set of people who read what I read knows this." Outside that set are people who have never encountered it once — who are, right now, walking around convinced that whatever they're bad at, they're permanently bad at. Not because they're incurious, but because nobody has put the idea in front of them yet.
And if one of them reads a post of mine and something shifts — that's the whole return on the investment. One person is enough. There's no version of that trade where I come out behind.
Meanwhile the cost of being wrong about it is that a few people read something they already knew and move on with their day. Nobody is harmed by a redundant blog post. The asymmetry is so lopsided it's almost funny that I spent years on the wrong side of it.
The smaller reasons
Two more, both honest, both less noble.
The polish tax got cheaper. English isn't the language I think in. A lot of what kept drafts in the drawer wasn't the idea — it was the certainty that the sentences would be slightly off in ways I couldn't see. That used to be a real cost. Now proofreading takes a minute. The barrier didn't fall because I got better; it fell because the tooling did, and I'm not too proud to take the discount.
I want to argue with people about this stuff. Some of these thoughts have been rattling around in my head for years with no one to test them against. A post is the cheapest way I know to put an idea somewhere it can be disagreed with. Half the point of publishing is finding out where you're wrong, and you cannot find that out in your own head — your own head agrees with you every single time.
What writing actually did to me
Here's the part I didn't expect, and the part I'd most want you to take from this.
I assumed writing was an output activity — you know something, you write it down, others read it. Transmission. That's not what it turned out to be.
Pick any topic I've written about and the honest starting position is that I knew maybe half of it. The other half I learned because I sat down to write. You reach the paragraph where the explanation has to happen, and the sentence won't come, and that's the moment you discover the hole. So you go read. You search. You find out how the thing actually works, because you've now committed to simplifying it for someone else, and you cannot simplify what you don't understand.
That's the trick. Simplification is a test you can't cheat. Vagueness is where fake understanding hides, and writing for a reader strips the vagueness out — every "sort of" and "somehow" in a draft is a marker on a spot where you don't actually know.
And what survives that process sticks. Effortful retrieval, putting it in your own words, wrestling with the structure — that's the stuff that puts a memory down deep rather than leaving it as a nice feeling you had while reading. I've read books I remember nothing about. I remember everything I've written badly.
So writing doesn't just help the reader. Most days the reader is the secondary beneficiary. I write to learn, and publishing is just the deadline that makes the learning happen.
So : write the thing
If you've been sitting on something because it isn't original enough, or because you're sure it's already been said — it isn't, and it has, and neither of those is a reason.
It isn't original because nothing is. You're standing on the same shoulders as everyone else, and the honest ones admit it. And yes, it's been said before — but not by you, not in your words, not with your particular scars in it, and not in front of the person who happens to need it this week.
I've written before about choosing the small deaths that make you grow, and publishing is squarely one of them. Something has to die each time : the version of you that got to keep believing it was smarter than the draft proves. That's the price, and it's cheap.
Write the thing. Worst case you understand it better than you did this morning.
I hope you find this article interesting. Thanks for reading. Until then, bye 👋