My training for the Hackney Half Marathon has finally picked up steam.

A few days ago, as I pounded the pavements of East London and got my sweat on, I fired up an episode of David Perell’s podcast How I Write called “Morgan Housel: How He Sold 4 Million Books”.

Perfect fodder, I thought, as I dot the I’s and cross the T’s on my new book.

If you don’t know Morgan, he's the guy who spent nine years writing articles for the Motley Fool, then jumped ship and a few years later put arse to chair to hammer out his bestseller The Psychology of Money.

As David and Morgan nattered away, I heard this gem from Morgan’s lips:

***

Thinking is horizontal and writing is vertical. 

Like, if you’re out on a walk, what are you doing? You’re making connections between different things. You’re going from topic to topic to topic.

But what writing does is, in almost this tortuous way, it anchors me to an idea.

And in that pain, in that frustration, I’ve done this giant deep dive and then I just come up for air and I’ve had a real shift without even realising it

***

That’s the life of a daily email newsletter writer right there.

Fort Grundy is a 10 minute walk to the train station. And each morning I set off on my dandy way knowing that within a moment or two, ideas will start to bubble up and dots will start to be joined.

Those ideas go straight into my iPhone.

Then the next day or week (or even longer – some of my ideas have been marinating for months like the pickles in grandma’s pantry), I’ll knuckle down and turn one of those seeds into a fully-flowered daily email.

And as the email grows limbs & leaves, my take on the topic grows too.

Granted, it might not work this way if I’m writing an email about baby poop (and there have been a few of those recently – but then again there’s been a lot of baby poop recently too).

But if I’m writing about the link between thoughts and feelings or I’m trying to nail a fun & funky metaphor then I find it’s almost impossible for my sense of what I’m really saying NOT to click, clarify and crystallise from the vertical writing process.

It’s like I’m writing, writing & writing some more and then BOOM! – the pieces suddenly fall into place.

Very handy.

And one of a bucketload of reasons why I keep writing.

The deeper I see about myself, my work and my life through my writing, the better things tend to go.

Not surprising really when I stop chasing what doesn't matter and stop trying to fix what isn’t broken.

Coaching works in much the same way too.

In fact, my coaching is designed to do just that. It's designed to nudge the pieces into place and turn what was foggy into something which finally makes sense.

You can read more about my coaching here:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com