So here we are, after one hundred posts.
I am writing this from the airport, at the end of a wonderful business event in Malta, with one eye on this text and the other on the slides I am finishing for tomorrow’s lecture. It feels like an accurate snapshot of the past years. Always in between things, always writing in the margins.
What have I learned? Quite a lot, actually. But some context helps.
Since I started re-blogging in late 2023, the setup has barely changed. A few posts, a handful each month. Shared only on LinkedIn, where I have a broader professional network, and on Facebook, where connections are fewer and closer. I never send posts to friends unless they are extremely specific, and even then it happens rarely. I do not care about profiting from this, at least so far. I do not care about influence either. If I did, I would have changed strategy long ago. If you are curious about the reasons behind my choice of blogging, here is a good starting point.
I thought more than once about moving to Substack, free or paid, like everyone else. Still, I set myself a rule: reach one hundred posts first. No pivots, no experiments before finishing the lap. Now that I am here, I still have not decided what comes next.
Let us start with the uncomfortable part.
The influence is lower than I expected. People read the posts and often like them. I know that more than ninety percent of podcasts stop after three episodes, so statistically this project is already a success. Still, I expected more traction, especially considering the themes I keep returning to and how much they matter to me. A part of my ego assumes that what feels important to me should resonate with others (or at least with some of them). When it does not, it is easy to read it as a flaw, either in the writing or in yourself.
I also probably damaged my LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn does not reward these posts. It prefers pics, short comments and viral stuff. Unfortunately, when people do not engage, the algorithm remembers. and that lack of engagement spills over to everything else. I like to say I do not care, but that is not entirely true. I use LinkedIn for business, and a weakened feed is not irrelevant.
And yet, there are things that matter more.
The most important one is simple and slightly frustrating: most of the time, what I like is not what people like. Some of the posts I am most proud of passed almost unnoticed. Others, the ones I had the lowest expectations for, performed surprisingly well. This is not unusual. The most famous Aerosmith song, I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing, was initially excluded from Nine Lives, their 1997 album. One of my favorite Springsteen’s tracks, The Promise, was cut out from The River. The way artists feel about their work and the way people experience it are two different things. Once something is out, it is no longer fully yours. Or it is, but in a different way.
There were also unexpected consequences. A few people started blogging because of these posts. They wrote to me privately. They told me they had wanted to write for years but never felt brave enough, often because they were afraid of damaging their reputation by writing about personal stories and emotions. Seeing someone else doing it, imperfectly and without pretending to have answers, made it feel possible.
What did change, though, is my relationship with writing. I feel freer. I feel less concerned about smoothing every edge and less afraid of saying things that do not fit neatly into professional narratives. That freedom travels. And when you write without fear, people read without fear.
After one hundred posts, I do not feel louder or more influential. I do not feel closer to any clear outcome. But I do feel lighter.
And for now, that is enough.
