There's a Power Within You
You just don't realise it yet.
It's mind-boggling how much time has passed since I first had this idea of launching my personal newsletter. But finally, I've taken action. If you're here reading this, you're one of the first subscribers.
The truth is, I’m not sure why you’d subscribed.
If your intention was to support a friend, I appreciate that. If not, I reckon there’s another reason:
You want to become better.
Deep down, you know you’re not 100%. But you want to be.
All we need is a spark to realise theres a greater purpose than what has been defined by society and culture. If you’ve found that key, I’m happy for you. If you’re still in the midst of unearthing it, I implore you to keep searching. It took me 30 years to realise this: we all could do with some help.
So here’s how I want to help you:
Express yourself through writing (e.g. writer better captions, write better stories, emails, whatever comes with writing today).
Take better pictures with your smartphone/camera (e.g. post nicer pictures on Instagram that will make people stop scrolling).
When you combine them, boom - your content just leveled up.
Maybe you’re in for the fun. That’s fine. We could still journey alongside.
But before that, I wanna activate something in you.
Everyone’s a storyteller.
Or at least, everyone has a story to tell.
I’m not here to tell you if it’s a good story, a bad story, an interesting story or a boring story. I can’t tell it on your behalf, because I’m not you. You can’t tell my story on my behalf, because you’re not me.
And ChatGPT definitely can’t write my story, because it isn’t me.
The first time I paid actual attention to the term storyteller, what immediately came to my mind were book authors. But I realized we’re all surrounded with fascinating stories by fascinating people:
A comedian tells a story through humour.
A movie director showcases a story through film.
A songwriter sings a story through lyrics and music.
A novelist writes a story based on literary and fantasies.
A chef cooks up a story based on the inspiration behind the dish.
A photographer captures a story based on the experiences he sees.
A politician spins up a story based on a narrative towards a common enemy.
A businessman markets a story based on how his product can help solve our problems.
If you look close enough, you’d realise they all share a commonality: self expression. Spill out a string of words and you get a script, recipe, novel, marketing plan, mood board or a memorandum. Without words, it’s almost impossible to explain your purpose.
Digital writing leader Dickie Bush says there are two types of writers in the world today:
The legacy writers. You’re probably old, grey-bearded, locked in a wooden cabin 24/7 staring out the window, waiting for inspiration to strike. Two years on, you come up with the next best-selling novel. Having lived a purposeful life, you entered the grave, leaving behind the words that had impacted millions.
The digital writers. They use the internet to share their writings and reach a wider audience. They don't isolate themselves to write, but instead write as part of their daily life. They also share their writing publicly on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin. They use data to figure out what readers want and make changes to their writing based on feedback.
Surprisingly, I’m in the latter category. And chances are you too.
A common misconception about writing is that you have to be a J.K Rowling to write. Another is that we think people don’t want to read what we write. And another, which I sometimes find myself thinking, I have nothing interesting to write.
Here’s the truth:
You think you’re supposed to sound smart, when actually your readers just want you to be clear. Maybe people don’t want to read what you write because you don’t make it easy for them to. And the biggest lie you’ll tell yourself is that your story isn’t worth sharing. Humans are constantly looking for inspiration, and almost all good inspiration are found in the minute details of individual stories.
Writing, as a form of telling your story, is one of the forgotten skill sets of the 21st century, not because I think it is, but because everything stems from writing. How much you actualise yourself derives from how often you pen your thoughts.
And that’s the power we all have in us, right now.
Legacy writers deserve their place in society and will continue to impact mankind for all of eternity. But for us digital writers, it’s time to take up the mantle.
So get this into your head: 1) you are a storyteller, 2) your story begins from your writing.
Technology’s undefeated opponent.
In 1445, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg left Strasbourg to move back to the city of his birth, Mainz. He was carrying a secret - a big one.
For at least ten years, he had been working covertly on several inventions that he believed would form the basis of a new sort of publishing business. At that time, book publishing were done manually by hand copying. It was time-consuming and expensive to produce, making it scarce. Access were primarily to the elite, religious institutions and scholars.
But Gutenberg was about to give the hand copiers a break.
Putting his metalworking skills to use, he created small adjustable molds for casting alphabetical letters of uniform height but varying width out of a molten metal alloy. These cast letters could be arranged quickly into a page of text for printing.
This machine was the letterpress.
With this, he began to prepare his first major work: the Bible.
What took 3 years to write by hand, Gutenberg did in days with his machine. The number of books produced in the preceding fifty years equaled to the number produced by European scribes in the previous thousand years.
History has taught us that nothing can match the power of technology. Take a look:
Fax machines were replaced by email.
Pay phones were replaced by smartphones.
Printed maps were replaced by Google maps.
Typewriters were replaced by personal computers.
Record players were replaced by digital music streaming.
Film cameras were replaced by digital cameras/smartphones.
Will written text be replaced? Or put another way: will technology replace the need for self-expression through text?
Gutenberg had put a handful of hand copiers out of a job. But when we talk about book publishing in the last decade, we see physical copies substituted by its digital cousin. However, that’s just the medium in which its content are distributed. The practice of handwriting may also be increasingly outdated, but they are just being transferred to a high-speed digital form.
So it seems that writing, be it by hand or computer, will not be replaced anytime soon. What’s left is technology’s undefeated opponent - text.
That’s why your words are more powerful than you realised, especially in the internet age. It has become our preferred medium for storing, processing, and sharing information in all forms, including your words. You have the liberty to express and distribute your thoughts on any platform, whenever you want to and however you want to.
Once written on the internet, it will remain forever.
“Writing, print and the computer”, writes Walter Ong, “are all ways of technologising the word”. And once technologised, the word cannot be de-technologised.
What happens when you write (or read)?
In one neurological study, researchers used brain scans to examine what happens inside people’s heads as they read fiction.
“Readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative”, reports Psychological Science. “Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences, mirroring those involved when people perform, imagine or observe similar real-world activities”.
Reading is by no means a passive exercise. The reader becomes the book.
Now, lets flip this. What happens when you write?
Nicholas Carr explains a symbiotic relationship between reader and writer in his Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Shallows.
“The words of a writer act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies.”
“It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory.”
And I believe this is how you get better - through your writing, you inspire others to take action, and through reading, you undergo an intimate exchange with the writer’s mind. When someone reads your story, their intellectual skills intensifies and becomes part of your mind.
We’re all connected in some way. And this is how we help each other.
The short of it?
If you want to increase your life, write. Tell your story. It has a formidable power that cannot be made obsolete. It will transform you as the storyteller, and the ones reading it.
If you’re in it for the stories on creativity and life, I welcome you to get inspired. If you’re here for the photography class, stay tuned :)
Be well,
MBT