Building in Public Is Just Keeping a Journal Where Strangers Can Read It

I started keeping a journal when I was fifteen. A black hardcover Moleskine, the kind that pretends to be more important than it is. I wrote in it for about three weeks. Then it sat on my nightstand for two years, full of moody declarations I'd be embarrassed to read back today.

The problem wasn't the journal. The problem was that nobody was ever going to read it.

I know what you're thinking. The whole point of a journal is that nobody reads it. That's the freedom. That's the safety. You can write the ugliest thoughts and the sky doesn't fall.

I'm not telling you that's wrong. It's not wrong. It's just incomplete.

Because here's what happens when nobody is going to read your writing — ever, not your spouse, not your kid, not some stranger you'll never meet — you stop being honest with yourself in a different direction. You don't lie to look good. You lie to look interesting. You lie to make the day matter more than it did. You lie because the only audience is your own ego and your own ego is the easiest mark in the room.

Most private journals I've seen aren't actually that honest. They're a teenager's monologue in a coffee shop. Big feelings, low stakes, nothing that actually moves.

Building in public looks, from the outside, like the opposite of that. It looks like marketing. Like a personal brand exercise. Like loud people farming attention.

Some of it is. A lot of it is, honestly.

But the actual practice — sitting down every couple of days and saying what you noticed, what you learned, what you tried, what didn't work, where you got it wrong — that's just journaling. The strangers are a side effect. The strangers are a forcing function. The strangers are the reason you can't write the moody Moleskine version anymore because someone, somewhere, would gently point out that you sound exactly like every other guy with a Substack.

You write better when somebody might read it. You think clearer when you have to land the plane in front of an audience that doesn't owe you their attention. You stop writing for your past self and start writing for some stranger who showed up and is going to leave in twenty seconds if you don't earn the next sentence.

Here's the part nobody tells you about building in public.

The audience is mostly imaginary.

I write a post and I picture someone reading it. Maybe a sales leader I haven't met. Maybe a friend I haven't talked to in a year. Maybe a recruiter scrolling on a Tuesday. The post goes out and gets, on a good day, a few hundred views and a handful of likes and one comment from somebody being nice. That's the actual scoreboard.

The imaginary audience and the real audience are not the same audience.

But the imaginary audience is the one that keeps you honest. The imaginary audience is why you write the second draft. The imaginary audience is why you cut the line that sounded clever but didn't actually mean anything. The imaginary audience is doing all the work, and they'll never know.

So what is building in public, really?

It's a journal you let strangers read. It's a discipline you trick yourself into by raising the stakes. It's a way of forcing your own thinking to actually be thinking instead of feelings dressed up in a thinking costume.

I'm not telling you to start a Substack. I'm not telling you to post on LinkedIn. I'm not telling you that the marketing benefit, if there is one, is going to show up on a timeline that matches your patience.

I'm telling you that the act of writing it down where it could be read changes what gets written down.

The Moleskine on my nightstand was a journal that nobody read, and so it became a journal that I didn't read either. The posts I write now go to an audience that's mostly indifferent. But they go somewhere. And because they go somewhere, I have to actually mean them.

That's the whole trick.

Strangers are the editor you'd never hire. They're the friend who's too polite to call you on your bullshit but who you imagine doing it anyway. They're the reason the writing is better.

If you've been thinking about doing something like this — a newsletter, a blog, a feed of half-formed thoughts — and the thing stopping you is that you're worried nobody will read it, I'd offer this.

The not-reading is the easy part. People not reading your writing is the default state of writing. That's true of every novelist, every blogger, every person who's ever published anything. Most of what gets written gets ignored.

But the writing still happens. The writing still does its work. The writing still, slowly, makes you somebody who notices things and remembers them and can say them clearly.

That's the journal. The strangers are a bonus.

Start the journal. Let them read it. Or don't. Most won't.

But the act of writing like they might — that's the part that changes you.