Take the plunge

I have a confession.

I read the CN&CO blog more often than I read most news sites.

Not because I have to. Not because I wrote some of it. Because it keeps teaching me things about the people I work with.

This week it was about Michele Katz, aka My Mishybelle.

Confessions of the un-tech-savvy: How AI became my midnight lifeline.

Michele has placed people in insurance jobs for decades. Honest to a tee. A caring human who demands and gives perfection in every engagement. And, by her own account, mildly terrified of her own phone settings. She wrote about it anyway. Streaming disasters. Muted WhatsApp calls. A Copilot she has nicknamed Molly. Self-deprecating, honest, laugh-out-loud funny.

She took the plunge.

I don’t think Michele set out to write something meaningful. I think she set out to write something true. Those often turn out to be the same thing.

Then there is Colin.

Colin Ford writes like it costs him nothing, which is the surest sign it costs him a great deal. He writes for a living. And has for decades. He reads more than anyone I know. He recently wrote about AI, em-dashes and Frankenstein getting flagged as machine-written by a detection tool that has clearly never read Mary Shelley, in AI can spell… but it still can’t think. Naturally funny. Naturally sharp. The perfect writer, if there is such a thing.

Michele and Colin are not the same writer. And that is rather the point.

One is finding her voice in real time, in public, slightly terrified and enjoying every minute of it. The other has a voice so settled he can be playful with it and can ghost write anything for anyone. I think that both are worth ten minutes of your day.

I have written before, in What remains, about influence being invisible. We rarely know which conversation, which encouragement, which small act of showing up actually matters to someone else. A school play becomes a career. A recommended book crosses continents in someone’s hand luggage. We plant seeds and mostly do not see what grows.

Reading someone’s blog (or social media post) is a small act of showing up.

It says: I see you. I am paying attention. What you made matters enough for me to stop scrolling.

That is not nothing.

The pause

I wrote another blog recently that took me nearly five hours and, in the end, was not about what I thought it was about. It was about stopping long enough to let things connect. Stopping properly, not just pausing between meetings to glance at a screen.

Reading does that too, if we let it.

A blog is not a headline. A book is not a scroll. Both ask something a WhatsApp voice note never will: sit still, follow a thought all the way to its end, let someone else’s mind rearrange the furniture in yours for a few minutes.

Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know did that to me a few months back, care of Colin’s Thursday Next Book Club, as I wrote about in The stories we keep… and not only on Thursdays. One line has stayed with me since: memory is purposefully selective. We edit ourselves constantly. Reading, properly, is one of the few disciplines left that asks us to stop editing for a moment and simply pay attention.

We are drowning in noise, opinion and half-truth, and rage travels faster than nuance ever will. I have written about that too, in Engage before you rage. The antidote is not complicated. It is unglamorous, though. Read properly. Read widely. Read things that were fact-checked by someone whose job depends on getting it right.

Which is why I want to ask this directly: subscribe to Currency. Buy a newspaper – hard copy or online. Support the journalists still doing the unglamorous work of checking facts before publishing them. People like Giulietta Talevi and Sarah Buitendach are exactly the kind of principled, curious journalists this country needs more of, not less. Good journalism is not a nice-to-have sitting alongside our feeds. It is the thing that makes the feeds worth having an opinion about.

And please buy books. Actual books, from an actual bookshop, ideally recommended by an actual friend. Not because screens are evil. Because a book is one of the last places left that will not interrupt you.

The sharing

Here is the part I’d love you to believe – everyone reading this has something worth saying.

Not a polished thesis. Not a marketing plan. A true thing, written the way Michele wrote hers: honestly, with the boring bits left in, without waiting to feel like a “proper” writer first.

I often meet people who tell me that they have always wanted to write something. A blog. A book. A few honest paragraphs about the thing they know best. And then they don’t, because someone else already writes better, or because it feels indulgent, or because the moment never feels quite right.

I don’t think the moment is ever quite right. Take the plunge anyway.

Michele took it this week. Roy Ockers took it years ago and I am still arguing with him about it. Denis Kotze, a friend who died earlier this year, took it at a bridge table full of stories that outlived him.

You are in good company if you doubt yourself first. Some of my favourite authors also did. Oscar Wilde, for all his public swagger, rewrote and second-guessed his own sentences obsessively, terrified of getting a single comma wrong. Chinua Achebe very nearly didn’t send off the manuscript that became Things Fall Apart, half convinced no one would take an African story told by an African seriously. Bessie Head wrote through years of rejection, poverty and exile before the world agreed she mattered, and we are all the richer that she kept going. If they doubted themselves and wrote anyway, the rest of us are allowed to.

None of them waited to be Colin Ford first.

You do not need to be a natural writer to be worth reading. You need to be honest, and willing to press publish.

So here is my ask, in three parts:

Read a few blogs this week. Michele’s. Colin’s. Anyone’s. Ten minutes. Properly, not skimming. I can recommend cnandco.com. Start with The Ink Link: The Windmill, the Work and Waylon, one of the best in that series. Then go back to where it started for me – Kurt Solomon’s own Ink Link, about his mom and the tattoo that still means the most to him. Then read Blake Dyason’s tribute to his friend Nato Amaral, twenty Comrades finishes strong and inked to prove every one of them.

Buy a book, or a subscription to a newsroom doing the real work. Currency is a good place to start.

And then write something. Anything true. Share it. Let someone plant a seed in you, and plant one back.

One plus one was never meant to equal two.

Go on. Take the plunge.