I was looking through the archives and realised that since starting Strawman, I’ve written something like 330 articles.
Some of them I’m proud of. Most of them… not so much.
Looking back, the difference is obvious. The good ones — the ones that still feel sharp — came from a place of genuine interest and conviction. I had something I wanted to say. The rest were written because I felt like I should say something.
In this game, content matters. So you crank the handle. You show up each week, toss some words on the screen, and hope something coherent (or at least passable) emerges.
But when there’s no spark, when the only thing driving the work is a vague sense of obligation, it shows. The writing feels wooden. You start to fall back on clichés. You reach for metaphors that don’t quite land. You talk about “staying the course” or how “time in the market beats timing the market” and hate yourself a little more with each keystroke.
It’s not that I don’t have thoughts to share. Just no new thoughts. At least, not that often and not on the specific topic of stock market investing. That’s really the challenge: in investing, the core truths don’t change.
Volatility isn’t risk. Focus on the business, not the price. Be diversified but not diluted. Keep your costs low. Stay humble. Think long term. Blah blah blah.
How many times can you say the same thing before it becomes self-parody?
Jason Zweig said it well:
“My job is to write the exact same thing between 50 and 100 times a year in such a way that neither my editors nor my readers will ever think I am repeating myself.”
It’s hard to do. Each Friday I stare blankly at a Word doc for half the day, trying to figure out what to say. Then I spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how to say it. And it still ends up with something that reads like the love child of a corporate mission statement and a fortune cookie.
Tools like ChatGPT have made the task easier. Not for writing the article itself — that would be both obvious and lazy — but it is great for bouncing ideas around, tightening a clunky sentence, or reminding me that “utilise” is just a pretentious way to say “use”.
But it doesn’t inspire.
And inspiration — real, skin-tingling, let-me-cancel-my-plans inspiration — is rare. Especially in a world where every insight has already been tweeted, memed, and SEO-optimised to death.
So maybe the answer is to embrace the repetition. To accept that saying the same thing over and over is not laziness, but the job. Because the hard part isn’t knowing what matters. It’s remembering. It’s holding onto those simple, durable truths when markets are manic, or boring, or just plain weird.
And maybe the goal isn’t to be original and clever, but to be clear and consistent. To be the calm voice in a world full of hype. To say the thing that needs saying again, and again, in a way that cuts through.
Even if it feels like you’ve said it a hundred times before.
Anyway, all of this is just a rather self-indulgent preamble to say, well, I don’t have anything interesting to say this week.
So I’m not going to.
Because sometimes, saying nothing is better than forcing something. Sometimes, the best you can offer is a pause. A week off from the noise. A little space to remember that the big truths don’t need constant repeating.
And if that sounds like a cop-out… maybe it is. But it’s an honest one.
Have a great weekend. We’ll try again next week.
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