I have made a few decent mistakes in my life.

I won’t detail them all, but one prominent example was in my early 20s when I signed the contract on a house then, after sleeping on it, realised it was a bad idea and pulled out. Turns out it isn’t cheap to pull out of a house contract!

But this isn’t a post on mistakes. It’s a post on a thought pattern I’ve noticed when I make mistakes.

A common thread I’ve managed to draw between a lot of my poor decisions is the audience I have in mind as I go through the decision-making process.

When I signed that contract for the house, I constantly had an external audience in mind. I’m embarrassed to share that I continued to picture my old school mates and imagined how cool it would be to tell them I’d purchased a house.

This week, I fear that I fell into the same trap. I was attempting to stand up against someone who I think was very clearly in the wrong on social media, but what I ended up writing was clearly constructed to catch the offender off-guard and make them look silly.

Although I do feel that I was ‘on the right side’ so to speak (against the person I see as an offender in the situation), as I thought back on it, something in me still felt uneasy.

I realised that, as I was writing the post, I didn’t have a clear, well-meaning objective in mind. I wasn’t calling the offender in and trying to reform them, or trying to encourage them to re-consider the situation from a different perspective, or trying to learn more about their perspective myself. In contrast, I was calling them out and trying to show them up.

More so, as I wrote it, I wasn’t imagining how my words might influence the perspective of the person I was writing to; I was instead imagining who might read it, and how I might gain kudos from those people for saying the right thing.

This is fundamentally what I think is the problem with almost every modern debate. We write not for truth or progress, but instead for an audience. Exchanges become performative, rather than exploratory.

I hope that I have built my career on a spirit of inquiry. This week, I feel like I mimicked a spirit of inquiry to score points. And so, I add another mistake to the tally.

That’s why I’m writing this post. Less for my external audience (you, my dear readers), but more for the internal audience whom I feel I should constantly serve.

Ezra Pound put it more poetically than I ever could:

It is true that the great artist always has a great audience, even in his lifetime; but it is not the vulgo but the spirits of irony and of destiny and of humor, sitting beside him.

Pound was replying to Walt Whitman, who had asserted that "to have great poetry there must be great audiences too". In his reply, Pound cleverly re-defines ‘great audience’ as ‘the vulgo’ (to oversimplify, ‘the people’) and states that to him, the only true ‘great audience’ is the spirit of poetry itself. To please the public is one thing, to keep council with that which is eternal is another thing entirely.

To me, this is the distinction between the idea of an external vs. an internal audience. When we write, speak, or present to try to gain acclaim from the external, we miss the mark. True artistry is achieved when we strive primarily to serve the voices within.

I’ll endeavour to better keep my own counsel when writing in all forms in future. I will endeavour to continue to explore rather than perform.

AI Declaration: AI was used like this and this in the writing of this piece.

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Steplab - PD Leadership & Instructional Coaching

I’ve just come off the back of an awesome week of workshops with Josh Goodrich, Rory McCaughey and Maxine Galante. The four of us presented a PD Leadership Intensive in Melb, Syd, and Perth last week and it was so much fun.

Some cool upcoming opportunities include this same PD Leadership Intensive in Darwin on July 13th, as well as more Steplab Instructional Coaching Intensives in Geraldton (Aug 6th) and Adelaide (Sep 1st)

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