# What I am doing here?

By [Alterman](https://paragraph.com/@alterman) · 2021-10-05

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I hate writing. It terrifies me more than any other form of expression.

It terrifies me way more than public speaking. I’ve spoken in front of hundreds of people, once with less than an hour’s notice. That was no where near as scary as when I’m confronted with a blank piece of paper. I presume it’s something to do with the finality of a talk: Once it’s done, whether good or bad, there’s nothing I can do to change it. I can go back to living the rest of my life. With writing, however, there’s always another edit I can do. Even once published, I still know I can go back and refine it further - make my thoughts clearer, more succinct, more convincing.

I’ve done my best to avoid long form writing ever since leaving University. That was relatively easy to do for most of my career as the work I did was in-person, collaborative and fast-paced. Now that I am a manager of managers in a fully remote organisation I can no longer avoid it. I believe the only way I can successfully disseminate ideas, infuse culture and truly collaborate remotely at scale is through writing. The question I asked myself was how do I get better at it fast?

My answer is this right here. I’ve loved nothing more than sharing my experiences with people who are smarter than me so they can go off and do way more impressive things than I ever will. I’ve done talks, coaching and teaching in the past but I’ve studiously avoided sharing any of those learnings in written form.

This collection of posts are intended to remedy that. The aim here is to hopefully provide some insights into the battle scars I’ve earned whilst scaling startups so you don’t have to bang your heads against the same walls I did. The commitment I am making to myself is to write at least once a week - come rain or shine.

I don’t know if anyone will read this, in some ways I hope no one does, but if you are here for some reasons please say hi! Would love to hear what brought you here, even if it was my Mum pestering you in one of her many Whatsapp groups.

Until next week…

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*Originally published on [Alterman](https://paragraph.com/@alterman/what-i-am-doing-here)*