Following my advice
© Andrew’s Grimoire
People who know me know that I stand by one rule: everybody should have a blog. Once in a while, people actually follow my advice. Then some go way further than I even thought possible…
In the 10+ years I have been blogging, the number of people I talked about having a blog is on par with the number of views an Elon tweet gets — way too many. Once in a blue moon, some people actually follow my advice, starting with my wife (although she slowed down quite a bit due to something called “work”), a few friends who understood the business value of a website… but my conversion ratio is admittedly pretty low. I stand by my idea about everyone having a blog, though, and I will probably write an entire piece on it at some point, because I think it could help solve a lot of issues…
But, for now, I will focus on one story: a colleague of mine, who I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with (mostly virtually) on a whole bunch of sustainability projects, who actually knows more about sustainability than me because he’s way younger (and actually studied the topic), had been saying a lot of interesting stuff about Gen Z points of view, or whatever the kids call themselves these days. I didn’t want to scare him off so I waited a little bit to try and talk him into starting a blog, but I eventually did. It was arguably an easy sell: the guy had ideas, liked writing, even drawing, worked on thought leadership pieces for a living... But the number of easy sells that don’t work out is still incredibly high.
In any event, a couple of weeks ago, we had a chat about how to technically create a blog — the guy may be younger, but I’m geekier, although that may not be something to brag about. It didn’t take long to convince him that it was easy: after I was done showing him the ropes of Squarespace’s back office (I’m not that geeky: I use simple WYISIWYG platforms), he was off and running. I touched based here and there to make sure he was good — because so many before him told me they were almost done and that was years ago and they still have nothing online — and he actually showed me the stuff he was doing. It was real.
A few days ago, he sent me a link — his website was ready and he’d already written a first post. Also, he’d decided that all visuals would be hand drawn, something I would never have dared (and for which you should thank me). The kicker was — the topics that he decided to cover were more insightful than 98% of my posts since 2013, if not more. Sexuality and inclusion, toxic academic environments… stuff that you don’t necessarily talk about right off the gate. Unless you’re pretty sure about what you’re doing.
I had to tell him — I was jealous. So I gave him a new challenge: write a book. That should give me a few months.
In the meantime, here is the link to the blog: