Patrick McKenzie on some of the benefits of writing online

Patrick McKenzie on why writing is useful even if you don’t have an audience:

I think too many people are paralyzed by their ability to write or their desire to write. They say things like, “It doesn’t matter to write if I don’t have an audience to be able to ship those words to.”

I think that even if you have literally zero people who read what you write today, it is still worth writing that thing today. Because you will produce an asset that you can use in the future in 1-on-1 conversations. This is 180 degrees from how most people think about audience building or writing online and playing for the numbers.

If the only thing you got out of writing an essay is that the next time you’re doing a job search — when you are writing cold emails to hiring managers for whatever the position is that you’re going after — you can use that one essay that you wrote back in the day as a proof of work. Like, “Hey, I have clearly thought about this more than most people who are sending you a cold email with a link to a resume that you are going to skim for 30s.” That would already be the highest ROI on writing a piece that most writers will get.