Publishing Your Work (Without Becoming “That Personal Brand Person”)
Most L&D professionals are sitting on a pile of hard-won insight.
And then leaving it on their hard drive.
This week’s signal comes from "Publishing your work increases your luck" a smart piece about publishing your work. Not in the influencer sense. Not in the “build a brand” sense. In the much more useful sense: making your thinking visible so it can grow, connect, and compound.
The core idea is simple:
Expertise grows faster when it’s shared—before it’s perfect.
Why This Matters
L&D doesn’t have a value problem. It has a visibility problem.
A lot of amazing work stays hidden because the bar feels too high. We assume something isn’t shareable unless it’s:
- Fully polished
- Officially approved
- Perfectly written and designed
That mindset quietly locks away a lot of really good thinking.
Your work is full of things worth sharing:
- Design tradeoffs
- Lessons learned the hard way
- “Here’s what I’d do differently next time” moments
- Small decisions that changed outcomes
When that thinking stays private, its impact ends with the project. When it’s shared, it keeps working.
This is how expertise grows in public. Not by declaring authority—but by leaving a visible trail of reasoning.
Or more bluntly:
L&D people are sitting on gold and treating it like scratch paper.
A Personal Note
I’ll be honest—I had the same reservations many people probably have.
I’m not some genius. (Not even close) Why would anyone care what I have to say?
For a long time, that was enough to keep my thinking to myself.
What changed wasn’t confidence. It was the frame.
I stopped thinking about publishing as “putting myself out there” and started thinking about it as helping other people doing similar work. People a few steps behind me. Or right alongside me. Or wrestling with the same problems from a different angle.
Once I made that shift, everything got easier. At least for me.
Publishing became less about promotion and more about contribution:
- “Here’s what I tried.”
- “Here’s what surprised me.”
- “Here’s what I’d do differently next time.”
That shift unlocked real benefits.
Some are visible—invites to speak in genuinely cool places, conversations that never would’ve happened otherwise, opportunities that came to me instead of the other way around.
But the bigger payoff has been quieter:
- Clearer thinking because I had to explain it
- Faster learning through response and dialogue
- Stronger relationships with people who “think nearby”
- A growing body of work I can reuse instead of starting from scratch
None of this requires a platform.
Or a budget.
Or permission.
It started with sharing what I was learning—while I was learning it.
There’s a line often attributed to Clay Shirky that captures this well:
"As long as you’re learning, you have something to share."
That’s the bar. Not brilliance. Not polish. Learning.
And when you treat publishing as helping—not promoting—it becomes one of the easiest, lowest-risk things anyone in can do. Starting today. For free.
If this sounds appealing but you're not quite sure how to get started? Reply to this email and tell me what you're thinking. I can probably give you some super easy, non-scary options to get you started.
