What I had to unlearn

The things that made me good at my first career were almost exactly the wrong things for my second one

Every time I write a post for this newsletter, there is a voice in my head that wants to add a footnote.

Not a figurative voice. A very specific, very persistent one that sounds approximately like a senior colleague from my pharma years. Every time I make a statement - “consistency is a system problem, not a discipline one,” “the people who build the biggest audiences aren’t more talented, just more visible” - the voice pipes up. Where is your evidence for that? What is your sample size? Have you accounted for confounding variables?

It took me two years of writing online to learn to write through that voice rather than for it. And I still haven’t entirely managed it.

This is the first thing I had to unlearn when I changed careers. That expertise requires proof.

In research, every claim I made had to be defensible. That’s not a bad thing - it’s actually a…