Benefits of Writing Newsletter

What benefits did I have after 57 newsletter issues?

It’s more than a year since I started writing (well restart writing that is) current newsletter. I counted close to 60 issues since I re-started. I thought I go a bit “meta-” or “Inception” and discuss what benefits did I get for the past year.

Here are a few benefits I’ve gained:

1. Structuring my thinking process

I like to ponder on topics especially on artificial intelligence, Future of AI and Lifelong Learning. In order to understand where the world is going, a good structured, well reasoning process is important! Having a more robust thought process also helps me in my consulting and training work as I can get to the main gist pretty quickly, and proceed to unpack and make it easier for my client through analogies that I can think of.

Writing helps me to build a more robust and critical thought process as I layout the thought process and I question it rigorously!

2. Sharing and inviting more perspectives!

I’d like a more robust thought process, per point (1)! This means I need more perspectives of looking at things, as I do not want to fall into blind spots that can be critical. Through the newsletter, I want to share my thoughts and ideas to invite more perspectives of looking at things, from idea formation to policy setting on how to enable the idea to flourish and not forgetting risk management! The more perspectives, the more robust the idea can be during execution! But sharing and getting perspectives is a numbers game! I sincerely hope more people can share my content! It’s a vote of confidence on what I put out there and also help in getting more people to share their perspectives!

3. Track record!

In this day and age, anyone can call themselves anything they want on social media! Just open up any professional website and you see many “experts” and fluffy titles, like “Data Scientist Managers” (team lead?) or “Data Artist” (Yes, its art and science but you paint with data?) or GenAI experts for something that just became popular in the last two years… I should call myself a Maths Expert since I studied mathematics for so many years now. Just kidding!

In this day and age where anyone can call themselves anything they like, how people can differentiate the signals and noises will be important. What is important then? It is the track record of content and posts that people put out there! The longer the track record, the more difficult it is to cover up inadequacies and more creds in the determining level of expertise and proficiencies. I want to use my writing to establish my track record and you can determine whether, and where to trust my sharing.

4. Be more concise

My aim is to have short form issues as much as possible, at most takes 5 minutes of my readers time. This is similar to point (1) but to be clear, a more robust thought process does not mean it is concise and to the point. It is concise only when at each stage itself is concise, i.e. easy to understand and convince myself and the readers with minimum amount of words possible. That itself is an art, and definitely a test of my writing skills as my thinking can be quite “verbose”.

5. Understanding the nuances and meaning of words

As I write my newsletter, I try to vary my vocabulary so as to provide some new “flavors” to it. As I ponder on these new words or technical terms that I write, I realise that these words are “evolving”. It provdes a great opportunity for me to learn how and why it evolves, the possible thought and emotions that it can rile or excite up. This is very beneficial as it helps in my communication skills! To be more mindful on the words that I use, to practice empathy.

6. Be more observant

I aim to have a weekly issue for my newsletter with a short two weeks break in late December. This “need” helps me to be more observant about my surrounding and more mindful about my work, reading and research too. Being observant helps me to notice the blind spots, the thought processes that others hold, and also how people behave. This complements other activities that I enjoy such as cafe observing (and hopefully revive my casino observing soon). Watching how other people behave, helps in my work too as I tend to translate what I observe back to any relatable data projects.

Conclusion

Anyway, these are some of the benefits that were realised in the past one year of my newsletter writing. I do encourage my readers to do some form of writing, as it can definitely improve your communication skills.

For fellow writers, what are your thoughts on this? Will love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading till the end! If you enjoyed the content, consider sharing this and/or get me a “book” or two over here. Greatly appreciate any support given! :)