I actually wanted to use it to talk about something which might seem a little counterintuitive to the usual stuff that we talk about in this newsletter and that’s that I think one of the most valuable habits you can build as a creator on YouTube is a regular practice of writing.
Over the past 7 years of making videos and building this business, writing has been one of the core parts not just of what I create but how I think. The act of putting words on a page forces you to confront the places where your thinking is actually fuzzy because it’s genuinely hard to write around a half-formed idea the way you can talk around one so every sentence has to commit to something.
When I was just starting out on YouTube, I would use my primary newsletter – LifeNotes – as a place where I could test ideas and write things out in more detail than the half-thought through concepts that were in my head. Once I had that clarity, filming became so much easier because I wasn’t trying to think and perform at the same time.
This process was a key part of that early stage on YouTube where I was trying to find my feet with the content, working through ideas, trying to stay consistent and this writing practice meant that I was able to maintain that output without feeling like I was scrambling for new ideas.
And this has come up again recently as I’ve been thinking about the role AI plays in all of this because I know a lot of people are leveraging it to speed up ideation, and I do too. Claude is genuinely brilliant at helping you explore angles on a topic, stress-test an argument, or give you a rough structure to react to. It’s become an incredibly useful tool for us internally to work through ideas and concepts as we build out videos.
But the part where you decide what you actually want to say about something – what your specific take is, what tone fits your audience, what story is going to land – that only comes from you. AI can give you ten possible structures; only you know which one resonates with your voice and your audience and the thing you’re genuinely trying to say and the way you figure that out is through writing.
So my general encouragement on this is to use AI as a thinking partner, not a thinking replacement. Use it to get unstuck, to generate options, to push back on your ideas but then spend time writing out the structure, bullet points or script yourself.
I started LifeNotes because I wanted a place to think out loud with people who cared about the same things I did. That’s genuinely still why I do it. And I’ll be honest: the discipline of writing one email a week has made me a better thinker, a better communicator, and probably a better creator. It forces me to have a clear point of view on something, to articulate it well enough that a stranger can follow it, and to do that consistently.
It’s also one of the few platforms where you actually own the relationship with your audience. No algorithm decides whether people see your email. They signed up because they want to hear from you. That’s a different kind of connection to a view or a like, and over time it compounds in ways that are hard to overstate.
You don’t need to send it every week. You don’t need a huge list to start. You just need something worth saying, and the willingness to sit down and write it. But even if you don’t start a newsletter, then at least having a writing practice is something that I’d recommend to everyone – especially if you’re just starting out on your content journey and trying to find your specific tone or voice.
Have a great end to the week 😊