Writing habit: “A voice emerges when you stop playing to the crowd.” – David Hieatt
I was speaking with a friend recently. He had started posting regularly, LinkedIn, mostly and had built a modest following of people who found his work useful. Then he stopped.
He stopped because he thought nobody was taking any notice.
He had set a mental target for the number of likes, shares, comments, and impressions he wanted to experience, and his posts had fallen short of those expectations. The gap between what he hoped for and what the metrics showed him was enough to make the whole enterprise feel pointless. So, he went quiet.
Here is the reality, though. A few weeks later, people came up to him; at events, in conversations, in messages, saying how much they had missed his posts. His writing had left its mark with the people in his circle. It had just taken them a while to say so. They were what I think of as the silent majority: the readers who absorb, appreciate, and occasionally act on what we write, without ever registering as a like, a comment, or a share.
Had he been holding on too tightly to his work?
The handbrake and what it costs us #
David Hieatt describes the moment you start writing authentically as releasing the handbrake. That metaphor has stayed with me since I first encountered it, because it describes precisely what the opposite looks like: a writer straining forward while something invisible holds them back. In my friend’s case, the handbrake was expectation; a mental scorecard that measured his work by metrics that were never going to tell the full story.
Hieatt knows something about building things regardless of immediate reception. Bankrupt at 16 and thrown out of college at 18, he joined Saatchi and Saatchi at 21, spent a decade in advertising, then left to go back to Wales and build his own brands. He started Howies, sold it to Timberland, then founded The Do Lectures, an annual event now viewed over 90 million times, voted one of the top ten ideas festivals in the world by The Guardian. In 2012 he started Hiut Denim in Cardigan, a town that used to have Britain’s biggest jeans factory. The entire purpose of the company is to get 400 people their jobs back.
None of that was built by playing to the crowd. All of it was built by staying true to a clear sense of purpose and letting the work find its own audience over time.
His advice to writers on LinkedIn is characteristically direct: “Stop chasing likes. It’s a dumb game. Instead, start talking about the future that no one else sees.”
What writing actually does #
My friend’s experience illustrates something important about the nature of writing as a communication tool, as opposed to other forms of professional promotion.
Thoughts often come to us out of hours; when we are not among work colleagues or networking contacts, not in a position to share them in the moment. Writing is the mechanism that captures those thoughts before they evaporate and releases them into the world when the world might be ready for them. The hands, as I’ve described them before, are the cutting tools of the brain; the means by which thinking becomes communicable.
And the three things writing reliably does, which I have found to be true in my own experience over years of consistent posting:
It improves self-awareness. The process of committing something to words forces a precision that thinking alone rarely achieves. A vague intuition about how to approach a prospect, written into a paragraph, becomes a principle you can test, refine, and return to. You discover what you think by writing it down, rather than the other way around.
It sharpens observation. Regular writing trains you to notice things; the throwaway comment in a client conversation that contains a whole article, the pattern across several interactions that suggests something worth saying. Writers see more than non-writers, not because their eyesight is better but because they are always, at some level, looking for material.
It gets things out of your head. There is a cathartic quality to writing that has no real equivalent in other forms of professional communication. Once an idea is written and released, it stops taking up space. The accumulation of unwritten thoughts is genuinely draining; the regular habit of writing them out is correspondingly energising.
What voice means #
Hieatt’s four observations on writing deserve to be read slowly rather than consumed as a list:
“I am at my best when I let go, release the handbrake, let others in.”
“Yes, writing often increases confidence. But more important, it decreases fear.”
“Writing better helps you think better. And vice versa.”
“A voice emerges when you stop playing to the crowd.”
That last observation is the one I keep returning to. Voice is not something you construct or adopt. It is something that emerges; gradually, through the accumulation of honest, consistent writing, when you stop trying to sound like what you imagine your audience wants to hear and start saying what you actually think.
The business owner who writes to generate likes is producing content for an algorithm. The business owner who writes to express something genuine about how they work and what they believe is building something more durable: a body of work that tells the right people, over time, exactly who they are dealing with. That body of work is what produces the phone calls that arrive out of nowhere. The referrals from people who have been reading quietly for months. The conversations that begin not with “tell me about your business” but with “I’ve been following your work.”
What to write about #
If you feel stuck in a rut, or feel the time is right to start expressing yourself through writing, the starting point is simpler than it might feel:
Write to discuss your experiences. Write to describe what you do. Write to describe how you do it. Write to describe why you do it in the way you do.
Spend half a day brainstorming ideas. Feel the can of worms opening up. There is almost certainly more to say than you realise and almost certainly nobody else in your specific sector saying it in quite your way, with quite your experience behind it.
Let your voice resonate.
And if you worry that nobody is listening — remember my friend. His people were slow in showing their appreciation. They were there all along.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
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