Over the past nine months my wife and I have been quietly incubating a baby. We welcomed her a few nights ago, and I … am going on paternity leave here at Commoncog.
What this means for me is that I’ll be sleep deprived for most of the next month (and beyond, lol, who am I kidding). What this means for you, though, is:
- I’ll remain an active participant of the Commoncog members forum.
- I’ll still be working on various cases or essays in the background! (Alas, I am currently still the bottleneck in Commoncog’s production pipeline for both).
- I may be slow to respond to emails, or severely sleep deprived if I agree to do a call with you, and …
- I won’t be publishing anything for a month. (I will likely operate at reduced capacity for the month or two after next, if I’m being honest with myself.)
I have a few notes on the changes we’ve launched on this site, and a few notes for where this is going, so I want to get that out of the way before I vanish for four weeks.
Commoncog’s Repositioning
Earlier this week we launched a new front page for Commoncog, which was the result of a repositioning project that started in Q4 last year. This redesign accomplishes three things:
- It makes it very clear that going forward, Commoncog’s future is built around the Calibration Case Method and the Case Library.
- It directs some attention to the private, members-only forum which we revamped at the end of Q3 last year (and is now a major part of the membership).
- Finally, most importantly, it presents a coherent view of Commoncog.
A ‘coherent view’ is another way of saying that Commoncog is now repositioned in a particular way. We think that the best way to learn business (perhaps second only to actually doing) is through the Calibration Case Method. We aim to be the best goddamn place to do that.
This positioning accomplishes a number of things. First, it does what any good positioning should do: it gets us to focus on a specific persona. To be more precise: calibration cases, tied with a specific positioning, leads to very specific content-reader fit. (Who that persona is, exactly, is an exercise for the alert reader. You may read the Understanding Customer Demand series to reverse engineer how we did this).
Second, the new position finalises a transition that I announced at the end of 2023, in Commoncog’s Next Phase.
Third, it allows us a certain level of quality control — and, as mentioned in the aforementioned announcement post — sets us up for the long term.
The quality control point is not obvious, I think. One of the things that I’ve learnt about writing online is that you do not want to be in the position of “I have to publish a piece this week; I don’t have any good ideas; let me write a take.”
Transitioning to ‘takes’ leads you down this inevitable path of obsolescence. On the internet, everyone and their dog has a take. Takes are cheap. So in order to attract continued attention, you lean into hotter takes, on popular topics, on shorter and shorter timescales. Over time you’d find yourself descending to the level of a pundit: having an opinion on everything, justified or no.
Pundits do not fare well with time.
I learnt this many years ago. From around 2007 to 2010 I wrote a decently successful blog about publishing novels on the internet. This was the time of the early blogosphere, and with the growth of blogs came the emergence of these reader-writer attention dynamics for the first time. I didn’t know about the trap then, of course. I started out as a teenager with a fiction blog on the side; I was interested in the form of ‘novels as serialised blog posts’. Writing was fun. Folks from the big publishing houses read my opinion pieces. But then, over time, I stopped writing the serialised fiction and began covering what was going on in the rapidly digitising publishing industry. It took me a few years before I realised I was effectively an industry pundit.
I threw in the towel in 2011. I knew that I wanted to build things and do things, not write takes about things; I’d also noticed that of the prominent early writers of the 2000-era blogosphere, none remained by the 2010s. More importantly, I did not like what I had become.
I’m not the only person to have noticed this pattern. The software exec and writer Will Larson wrote the following in a 2023 essay titled Writers Who Operate:
As you watch new writers come onto the “scene,” you’ll often notice a shift from a genuine passion in a given niche to engaging in topical events and controversy. The reality is that it’s exceptionally hard to write something that generates a lot of discussion, and it’s even harder to repeat that formula consistently. After folks have the experience of writing a popular piece, they often get sucked into the desire to produce more, and this ultimately means seeking wider distribution.
Reliable distribution is a hard thing to find on the internet, and one of the most obvious opportunities for distribution is to engage in controversy. Write something controversial, engaging in an existing controversy, subtweet someone who did something dumb, whatever. The problem with this is that it pulls you out of picking topics, and instead towards picking positions.
Ultimately, I don’t believe you can say anything particularly novel or interesting in reaction to a trending topic. There are certainly takes that are more or less nuanced, but mobilizing the base is not advancing the industry.
This problem is even more acute when you’re trying to make a financial living out of your writing, because matching your message to your audience becomes that much more important. You’re going to spend even more time tuning your messaging to resonate with what the audience currently believes than you are on writing something new.
I’ve been surprised at how long I’ve been able to write Commoncog to the standard that I wanted. Unlike my younger self, I did not become a pundit. Partly this was because I continued doing things in business — sometimes as a consultant, sometimes for free. Even today there are a small number of business experiments I have ongoing that I can’t really talk about. But as I alluded to in Commoncog’s Next Phase: this state of affairs cannot last. There are certain business experiments that I want to run, certain business adventures that I want to go on that will take a few decades to see through. Commoncog’s model has to change.
This current repositioning is the answer. Publishing cases makes it unnecessary to publish takes. It happens to be a fine coincidence that the Calibration Case Method accelerates expertise. It is fun to read stories of businesses and think about why things are the way they are, like Warren Buffett did in his own time. And it is by design that others can write cases; not everything in Commoncog has to be from me.
Anyway, one of the nice things about completing this repositioning is that I don’t have to get into the detail of where we’re going and why; all of that is explained in the earlier announcement post. This just marks the end of that transition.
Wrapping Up
Ok that’s nice and all, but also I am taking a month off because I am now a dad.
I have very little idea of what that means, because the only way to know is to be a parent. And I will spare you all the cliches. I know that I will sleep very little and exercise not at all for many months, and that I will eat different foods and have my heart live outside my body and see my life reshaped in ways that I cannot currently imagine. (“Cedric,” a friend told me, “you think surviving the first months are important? You need to start thinking about potty training very soon.” My friend is currently despairing of the toilet.) But in many ways the veil of knowledge remains intact. I am only just walking through.
I met my daughter for the first time three nights ago and I am already enthralled. This feeling is very biological. It feels odd to know that a little creature with your nose depends on you for continued survival. I plan to spend a lot of time with her now.
I’ll see you on the other side.
Commoncog will return to normal publishing on the week of the 20th October. I reserve the right to publish random pieces during my leave, though! Members: you should check the forums; I’ll be reading more during this period, and may post lots of unpolished pieces about whatever it is that I’m consuming. I may also be incoherent, but we shall see.
Originally published , last updated .
