When I started copywriting full-time in 2018, i did what most people do when they take their craft seriously — I poured my entire identity into my work. This whole craft notion wasn't something I theorized about or chose so much as fell into, with the predictable self-seriousness of someone who'd decided to make writing their thing™. Naturally, i hated when others edited my writing. If their edits made the piece worse, I resented them. If their edits improved the piece, I turned that resentment inward, berating myself for my oversight, my laziness, my complacency. 

Meanwhile, the irony was that this whole precious-writer routine — the attachment to my work — obscured what should've been obvious: writing, especially when pursued within a capitalistic frame, exists in an ecology and not as something in and of itself. As I worked with different orgs and teams, I began to see how my words needed other people and systems to reach their audience, i.e., all the machinery that actually gets ideas from Brain A to Brain B. My craft was just one part of a complex system that brought ideas to market. I learned to make peace with trade-offs. In a business context, my personal taste and creative vision couldn't always take priority. And, of course, the craft-purity stuff starts looking kind of quaint when you're trying to write like a machine on a strict shipping schedule. 

But the real mindset shift came through ghostwriting. Many people at the time often asked me in a serious and concerned tone if I minded others taking credit for my work and ideas — as if authorship were this straightforward transaction of idea-ownership. However, the whole demand for authorship and credit misses what's actually going on with ideas, which is that they're less like possessions and more like these semi-autonomous cognitive entities that colonize neural networks through the medium of language. And by this point, I had come to understand that people don't have ideas; ideas have people. 

When I felt I had served an idea well, credit became irrelevant. My focus shifted to getting that idea into the world. Ghostwriting became an unexpected ally in this mission. Instead of being limited to whatever reach my personal brand could muster (which: not much), I could distribute the same idea through multiple faces. I stopped caring about the words being "Mine." My only concern became whether I had done justice to the idea — a standard I rarely felt I met, because doing justice to an idea demands so much more than just good writing. It requires a kind of intellectual cartography: mapping not just what the idea is, but how it works, where it fits, what it changes. 

When I wrote for Stoa Daily, the goal wasn't just information transfer — anyone with a keyboard and a medium account can do that. Instead, we had one core metric: 

"Can we leave our readers with something interesting to think about? Can we make them go, ‘Wow, I've never thought about it that way’? 

Can we help them think better by thinking out loud in a cogent manner ourselves? 

That reaction told us we had served the idea well. We were after that specific cognitive shift, that moment when someone's mental models get subtly but permanently rewired. "I never thought about it that way" became our North Star, not out of some grandiose mission but because it was the only reliable signal that an idea had actually made the jump from one consciousness to another. 

And it actually worked! Readers naturally echoed back our internal metric without prompting. They used to actually write back to us and describe their experience in more or less the same words. 

"It helps me think better." 

That was the specific signal we were looking for, and we got it unprompted, which told us we were doing something right. 

This kind of influence requires three things working together. 

First: this almost pathological empathy for the reader's cognitive state at each moment. You must anticipate their questions and answer them just as they arise. You're having a conversation with someone who's not there yet, but will be. 

The second challenge is getting the level of abstraction right. Write too abstractly and you're just showing off, mentally masturbating in public. Write too simply and sure, people will understand what you're saying — but they won't grasp what matters about the idea, why it's powerful, how it changes things. 

So you have to find that level of analysis where the abstract principle and its concrete implications become mutually illuminating. And this depends on your audience. Too much abstraction can become self-indulgent while too little can rob the idea of its power. So, serving an idea well means finding its natural level of complexity for a given context, rather than imposing either simplicity or complexity from the outside. 

The third element (and this is where most "Good writing" falls apart): grounding the idea in the actual texture of lived experience. 

There are two ways to express a truth. You can state it directly, like Nietzsche does — sharp, clear, aphoristic. He declares the truth and leaves you to grapple with the implications. Then there's the Dostoyevsky approach. He takes the same existential truths, but instead of simply stating them, he shows them playing out in the lives of the Karamazov brothers. You watch Dmitri struggle with his passions, Ivan with his intellect, Alyosha with his faith. The principle isn't merely stated but embodied in characters, in situations, in choices that feel real. You experience the philosophy as it reveals itself in how these characters respond to the situation as it unfolds. 

This second approach is infinitely harder. It requires careful observation and the ability to find the right way to contextualise the idea for your specific audience. But when you pull it off, the idea irreversibly reshapes a person's way of seeing the world. 

That's what it means to truly serve an idea. And this commitment to serving ideas changes everything about how you write. The questions you ask become different. 

Instead of 

"How do i make this sound good?" 

Or 

"How do i show my expertise?", 

You start asking 

You only need that much. No less. No more. And this is an exercise in negating that part of your being that prides itself in showing off as much knowledge as possible, inflating the scope to a degree where it becomes impossible not to sound like you're rambling. 

I also spend a lot of time thinking about rigour. Not just factual accuracy, but rigour in understanding the full topology of an idea, its edges and limitations, its hidden associations and implications. Only then can I start thinking about how to convey this understanding to others. Sometimes that means spending days, even weeks, gestating the idea, making sure you haven't missed crucial nuances or contradicting evidence. And often, it means throwing away additional context because they're inflating scope and getting in the idea's way. 

I've never really succeeded at doing justice to an idea. Ideas are living things. They have depths and connections that keep revealing themselves the longer you sit with them. Every time I write, I'm aware of many aspects I'm not capturing, all the connections I'm not making clear enough. There's always a lot more I could've added to serve the point better. But that's a trade-off I'm happy to make in service of landing a few things well. 

"Doing justice to an idea" might as well be a transcendental notion. But more concretely, the real constraints are always capitalism and its associated trade-offs. No one's making art outchea! And maybe that's where the meaning resides — not the impossible task of perfect expression, but the endless process of trying to do justice to things that will always exceed our ability to fully articulate them, and the very real walls we'll run into while trying to make a buck off of our writing. 

Though, I should probably acknowledge that this whole meta-commentary on the impossibility of perfect expression might itself be just another form of "Writerly self-indulgence", even though I've not done anything good enough to merit that label, yet. 

But no matter the mediocrity, the ego needs an outlet to assert itself. And so it does.