Draft Four: The world is not a focus group

More than 2,000 people get these random letters now.

This morning’s rain is the first I’m aware of in my new apartment.

Part of my terrace is closed off with large windows and covered with plastic panels. I’ve set up my office there. It might be a temporary setup; it all depends on how rough winter gets. It’s raining densely now, the drops are indistinguishable, a mild continuous tremble just above. The birds, usually the only ones breaking the silence on Saturday morning, are muffled. The sky is a grayish blue with patches of darker clouds crossing its canvas.

On my desk is a Tefal thermal cup, stainless steel hugged by blue rubber – a sign of how much I dislike cold coffee. It’s a little past 7 o’clock, and I’m writing.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’ve looked forward to this: to Saturday, to silence, to setting Word to focus mode (highly recommend), to tapping these somewhat oily keys. I recently told a few people that writing (these letters) is the only moment during the week where I feel absolutely no guilt turning off my phone, or any other inputs, for a few hours.

I don’t care about what happens in the world and who is looking for me.

I am here. I’m thinking as I type. I am scared. I’m ecstatic.

What if this is who I am?

*

This is the question an essay I read recently asks: Why can’t we admit what is obvious?

In this piece, Dan Shipper admits to being a writer. One that also likes to code, build products, start businesses. But all those other things come out of his love for writing. For years, Dan writes, he did things and set writing aside, or made it secondary. He was a coder who also loved to write. He was a founder who also loved to write.

“How to square wanting to be a writer with wanting to build businesses”, he wondered. “It was scary to want to be a writer because it meant giving up on being a founder.”

It doesn’t, Dan says, and I’m grateful for that sentiment.

Not that long ago, a man I admire texted me he likes this newsletter. He was glad I was writing more, and he added: I always thought you were a better writer than an editor or a manager.

It was high praise coming from him, but it also stung a tiny bit. Those latter identities had been, for the past decade at least, ones I chose consciously: I was an editor and a manager who also liked to write, but rarely had the chance or found the time. Or, as I most often used to put it: I was a mediocre writer who became a mediocre editor and a mediocre manager.

Of course there is anxiety beneath the self-deprecation. Some of us fear that committing to an identity, to one obvious thing or passion, closes all other doors. Some fear that committing amounts to suddenly being judged to the highest standards of that choice. (That’s the hell perfectionists go through): “An editor you say? Let’s see how you compare to the greats.”

I’m more often in the latter camp. There is a lot of benefit to wanting to be better and to excel, there is also never-ending anguish and shame that you are not enough, when you actually are. That’s why I avoided the label of “writer”. I loved to read since I can remember, which is why I revere writers, especially those who choose fiction as their tool for understanding their lives and the world. I was a happy camper when I discovered journalism: it was writing, but with less pressure. It wasn’t art, but it could be artful. It wasn’t a calling, but it could be a profession you could devote yourself to. It wasn’t everlasting, but it could be a sensible draft of history.

When I later stumbled into narrative journalism – true stories told with literary devices – I was ecstatic. This is it, I told myself. This is the path I’ve been searching for. That discovery took place in the US, twenty years ago, as I started listening to This American Life. It continued during those master’s years by reading magazine journalism that read, well, like novels.

This one story in particular just took my breath away – I had no idea journalism could do this. It was a tragic love story set in the world of freediving, a treacherous thing to love. He is a record-breaking superstar free diver, she aspires to be one, too. They fall in love. He becomes her coach. She turns out to be a natural, maybe even better than he is. Then, attempting a record breaking dive, she dies. He gets blamed for her death. Then, he dives to finish what she started.

What. The. Fuck.

*

Long story short is that I wrote for a few years, playing with reporting, with form, with structure, with tone. By then I was back in Romania, and quite lonely in my love for this kind of work. I had a job at a magazine and tons of freedom as an editor and a writer, but no peers. I began teaching, although I sweat profusely in front of crowds. A few years later I had built a community large enough to support this crazy magazine project I cooked up alongside my friends. It was this group of people that gave literary journalism in Romania a new life: bringing it closer to journalism than it had been before (when it was overly ornate, opinionated rather than factual, and often melodramatic), simplifying the language, but certainly complicating the narrative.

I used to joke that I started a magazine so I could write, but then stopped because I needed to be editing, and, eventually, I struggled with editing the way I wanted to edit because I also understood I had to own up to being a manager. And, on top of this, I also wanted to build new things – blame my curiosity for my restlessness.

I did all of these at once, and probably none at the level I aspired to. This became frustrating. When I wrote, I always felt I lacked the time for a couple of extra drafts. When I edited, I felt I lacked the time to coach the reporter just one step further. When I managed, I felt I lacked the time to double check everything was clear to everyone, and they all had the right tools and skills.

But I also didn’t want to have to choose.

*

These tensions are obvious in this newsletter. They are embedded in the name: it’s an updated version of everything (a Draft Four), but I’m still tinkering with it. I know some things about journalism, life, and other assorted shit, but there’s more to come and much to update.

A journalist-builder-thinker I admire, Isabelle Roughol, posted about Draft Four this past week on LinkedIn, summing up this feeling of work-in-progress or not choosing the obvious: “My favourite newsletter at the moment breaks all the rules of newslettering. It doesn’t have a target audience, a growth strategy or any kind of monetisation. It doesn’t solve a problem for the reader. It’s not a niche, it doesn’t have a clever name telling you what it’s about. There won’t be events, podcasts or a YouTube channel.”

Isabelle is right; I am breaking many of the rules of newslettering and journalism product building. I’ve refused to make a lot of strategic choices that I would (and do) advise others to make. (Especially the monetization part.)

But there is one obvious thing I did choose. To write. To tell a story. Or, more accurately, to unpack a story, and retell it to make sense of it.

*

This week I passed the 2.000 subscribers mark. Thank you. I don’t know many of you. Some I’ll probably never meet. I didn’t advertise these letters. I didn’t look for new readers. I sent the first one in mid-January to 41 people – my age at the time. You are here because one of those people resonated with one of these letters and passed them on. Then someone else did, and so on.

I started writing it because writing is a form of discipline. It helps me think. I also started it because I believe we are the stories we tell ourselves, and I wanted to unpack mine. What stories have I been telling myself – about writing, management, editing, being a man in Eastern Europe etc.? And what are the stories that clash around us – about our tribalism, our need for security, our fear of vulnerability, our need of belonging?

The idea was simple: I knew this would be a year of transition(s), and I also know we create stories – with ends and new beginnings –, to process loss, to grieve, to find the strength to move on. I also believed the exploration and the processing of it in writing would bring me closer to new ideas. Over the summer I actually listed the many future jobs I saw myself doing.

I wrote through all of what happened this year to understand, to grieve, to enjoy, to question, to find belonging. Many of you stayed, and many of you also said that, while it was a strange experience receiving long Sunday letters, you could also relate. I guess, in a way, I have to admit to something obvious. But it’s not about being (a writer, an editor, a manager, a builder etc.).

It’s about doing.

*

My amazing friend Jennifer Brandel is one of these people you can’t put a label on. She’s actually working on a story about the pain of trying to live without a label in a world that wants you to have one. I recently had her as a teacher during my leadership & innovation program, and her bio slide didn’t list her as „being something”, but „doing something”: working on “designing systems that listen, respond and evolve in order to better serve people”. You don’t have to be something in order to do these – you can do them in journalism, in business, in community work.

I’m like Jennifer, all over the map, with similar interests: creating spaces of care and belonging, where people can understand, find and transform themselves. My lens is one of storytelling, and the primary tool of storytelling is writing. But this is also what I tend to do when I edit, when I teach, even when I go into a newsroom to train or do consulting.

Take the least obvious one, the consulting part: I can go into a newsroom and agree with them that their stories could be sharper, feature better developed characters, and be better edited. I can share frameworks, tips, tools, and dozens of resources. But what’s blocking progress or growth is rarely a lack of awareness of the available tools (those you can simply Google): it’s clogged systems, lack of transparency, outdated stories about how we work and why, misplaced energy and so on.

That I look at the world through the stories we tell ourselves (and that I want to help rewrite some) is even more obvious to me as I share it with you. But just because it’s obvious, it doesn’t mean it’s easy to live in this reality.

*

I met with a bunch of master’s students this week. It was a safe space, so we talked about money, getting a job etc. One asked how I got used to “corporate life”, by which she meant work in general: she said she was a goofy person, and her employers thus far all made her feel she had to invent a more proper persona on the job.

Being goofy was obvious to her. And I told her I was sure one day she’ll find a place where she could be her full self, less masks. But it wasn’t a guarantee, and it isn’t a right.

What I love about the Gen Zers I spend time with is that the majority wear their needs, convictions, and boundaries on their sleeves. What some have yet to understand is that doesn’t mean they’ll all be met, even by the best meaning employer or partner. Think about it this way, I told the students. You decide on a personal boundary. An employer, let’s say, has a certain boundary, too, and let’s posit they are the right kind of employer, and the boundary is communicated transparently at the start. You might find common ground and a third way, but you might also not – your two obvious needs might clash, and it’s no one’s fault.

It's becoming obvious to me what gives me energy, and where I draw life from: telling stories about who we are and how we could be better, helping others tell them, convening people around stories so we can share experiences, learn, and belong, building systems or processes with an emphasis on care.

But it might be that it’s hard to make one job out of any of these, let alone from a mishmash.

It might be that the audience for complexity in a world of noise is both small and hard to find.

It might be that I can’t explain what I do, and I’ll be skipped over when people look for collaborators.

Admitting what is obvious is freeing. But it’s not the end of the road. It’s where the work begins.

*

To sum up: I’m getting there. What is obvious is coming into sharper focus. I don’t have to choose who I am because I better understand how my identities connect through what I do. (I know, we actually are what we do, not what we say we’d like to do).

And then comes the real challenge: finding ways for the doing to translate into meaning for others. You know, moving the human heart.

Every time I think about what it means for writing to be “good”, I’m reminded of a passage from Unless it Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt, essayist, writer, teacher. The idea is simple: writing will matter if it moves the human heart.

It’s how I always defined my kind of impact: maybe a story doesn’t change a law, topple a corrupt public official, but it could at least be useful to somebody, or, even better, touch somebody in ways they didn’t expect. Maybe it can give them a new perspective, empower them, even heal some of their wounds.

Here’s Roger:

For your writing to be great – I mean great, not clever, or even brilliant, or most misleading of all, beautiful – it must be useful to the world. And for that to happen you must form an opinion of the world. And for that to happen you need to observe the world, closely and steadily, with a mind open to change. And for that to happen you have to live in the world, and not pretend that it is someone else’s world you are writing about. (…)

Nothing you write will matter unless it moves the human heart, said the poet A. D. Hope. And the heart that you must move is corrupt, depraved, and desperate for your love.

How can you know what is useful to the world? The world will not tell you. The world will merely let you know what it wants, which changes from moment to moment, and is nearly always cockeyed. You cannot allow yourself to be directed by its tastes. When a writer wonders, “Will it sell?” he is lost, not because he is looking to make an extra buck or two, but rather because, by dint of asking the question in the first place, he has oriented himself toward the expectations of others.

The world is not a focus group. The world is an appetite waiting to be defined.

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SIDE DISHES:

1. Isabell, whom I mentioned above, just started the newsletter we all need: one tackling the important need for better bosses in newsrooms. These places are full of hardworking people, intelligent critical thinkers who want to make the world better. But the sum of them rarely adds up to a constructive work environment. Often, quite the opposite.

2. I missed Ezra Klein, whom I adore. He is back from book leave, and, speaking of the stories we tell ourselves, he unpacked many of them in his latest podcast episodes, both about Israelis and Palestinians. One is about why Israel had to do something after October 7, and why what it’s currently doing is wrong. The other is about what years of polling shows about the inner lives and views of Palestinians, who are not just one thing.

3. To close, the story of a man who liked to cook, and also liked to tell stories. As it turned out, he was actually a storyteller, who also liked to cook. Roadrunner, a film about Anthony Bourdain, is finally on Netflix.