Stop posting random thoughts

A Framework for Strategic Short-Form Writing.

It took me a long time to understand short form writing and the dynamics of social platforms. I started on X and was thoroughly confused. I would read a post scroll through the comments and just not understand what was going on. It seemed like a bunch of bots interacting with each other. There was just no substance. I hated it, which is why I quit X 2 months after starting.

But, while there are a lot of bots on X, I have since learned that I was coming at it from the wrong angle. Like 99% of people, I was trying to write tweets to get attention and gain a following. I hadn't put in the time to really think about what my values were, what I actually wanted to convey, my voice, my identity, my goals…I was just kind of posting random thoughts. There was no coherent strategy and hererin lies the problem.

Most people start with short form because they think it’s easier than long form. They think it doesn't take as much time or effort to post three lines of text than to write a 2000 word essay.

It sounds kind of logical right? But this is fundamentally short sighted because short form doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is always the distillation of a much deeper wide ranging philosophy that the writer has developed over a long period of time.

Until I started posting short form notes, two or three times a day, I didn’t fully understand the role they play. Since I doubled down on short form I have grown to over 5000 subscribers and almost 9000 followers. 90% of these came from within the substack ecosystem itself. However growth doesn’t just happen because you start writing more short form, short form is the catalyst for worldview construction, resonance and connection, which then leads to growth.

We are going to get tactical in just a minute but before we do it’s important to understand where this is coming from.

The mistake most people make is assuming short form is easy just because it’s short, but writing short-form is actually far harder than it looks.

It demands precision, it exposes confusion and it reveals whether or not you’ve actually done the work of knowing who you are and what you stand for. Most people post random thoughts and then wonder why no one responds. And just to be clear, that’s ok. We all started from zero with no idea what we were doing, myself included.

This letter is for those that don’t like short form (I used to hate it), haven’t understood it and are not utilising it fully. Because when you approach short-form with depth and intention, it becomes one of the most transformational practices in your creative process.

It helps you find your voice, test your thinking, build your audience, and most importantly, stop creating in isolation. When done right It’s about becoming visible in a way that actually leads somewhere. If you’ve been struggling to get traction, this is where I’d begin. Let’s walk through it.

Why Short-Form Is Misunderstood

If you’re anything like me then short form is new for you. For me Everything from school, to college to university and then work was centred around long form.

It’s easy to think that if you can write long form, short form is just a piece of cake but what I’m trying to convey here is that we need to think of each individual short form piece of writing as a link in a chain that feeds into your personal story and values.

What most people miss is that short-form, when done properly, is a craft.

A thinking tool, a visibility engine, and a map of your inner architecture. It forces you to distill the signal from the noise. It shows you what you actually believe not what you say you believe.

There’s a reason the brain finds it harder to write something meaningful in 200 characters than in 2,000 words.

Cognitive compression requires clarity. Clarity requires structure. And structure demands you know what you’re building toward.

From a neuroscience perspective, short-form activates the brain’s reward prediction system. It’s fast, reactive, iterative. But without alignment, it becomes a slot machine for validation. You chase likes instead of testing ideas. You seek applause instead of truth and that is the real danger.

Short-form will either sharpen your worldview or fracture it.And in a digital world full of scattered thinkers, fractured signals, and borrowed beliefs, the creators who know how to write short-form with coherence and depth will stand out like signal in a storm.

Short-Form as a world view engine

It took me months to realise the problem wasn’t visibility. It was misalignment.

My notes were being ignored because they weren’t grounded in a worldview. I had not yet fully formed an identity.

Short-form writing is not just a tool for distribution it is actually a mirror. A kind of feedback loop for your thinking, a refinement system for your voice and ultimately a path to resonance.

But that only happens when you treat it with the same seriousness you give your long-form work. Not as a throwaway slot machine of random ideas, but as an intentional practice of building your presence in the minds of others.

The reason most creators fail at short form is simple: they think it’s about attention. It isn’t. Short form is about conditioning perception. It’s a way of shaping what people believe about you and your work every time they encounter your name.

When you approach it this way, the question isn’t “what should I post today?”

It’s “what do I want people to know, feel, and remember so deeply that they could explain my work without me in the room?”

From that lens, short form takes on five essential functions:

1. Encoding your lexicon

Seeding the key phrases, concepts, and language that make your work unmistakable. This is the feeling people get when they see your work. Think opinionated, contrarian, encouraging, humourous, calm, chaotic, aggressive. There’s no right or wrong but people should be able to articulate you and your voice from your notes.

The words you choose to repeat give texture to the feel of your writing. I talk a lot about identity, and things like creative immunity, the discipline spiral and alignment architecture, these aren’t just ideas, they’re identity markers.

2. Training pattern recognition

Human cognition is a pattern-seeking engine. When you publish short form regularly, you force yourself to pay attention to recurring patterns in your own thinking. That pattern recognition is the raw material of originality.

Your Notes become sketches of a worldview in progress and your audience doesn’t just consume those sketches, they begin to anticipate them, to feel like they’re watching a mind assemble itself in public.

3. Shaping collective psychology

In persuasion psychology, repetition and familiarity are precursors to trust. By drip-feeding fragments of your worldview in short form, you’re not just “building an audience” you’re rehearsing the emotional and intellectual conditions for resonance. When the time comes to offer something larger such as an essay, a product or a program, your readers already inhabit the frame of reference you’ve been quietly building. No hard pitch required.

4. Riding the platform currents

Algorithms reward consistency and volume. Short form is the only format that lets you meet those demands without burning out. By posting daily fragments, you multiply your surface area of discovery. Every Note is another entry point into your world, another chance for the right person to stumble across you. Long form alone simply can’t compete with the speed of distribution short form unlocks.

5. Asymmetric growth

Most long-form takes hours and moves slowly. Short form can hit in minutes. A single Note can outperform months of essays. I’ve had several notes that have brought in 100’s of subscribers and one that brought almost 1800. My best performing long form post brought in just 120 subscribers. That asymmetry is why ignoring it is so costly, it’s the only way to expose yourself to outsized upside without outsized effort.

When you see short form as a worldview engine not just a distribution tool, the entire approach shifts:

• You stop chasing dopamine spikes from viral posts.

• You start designing a network of ideas that compound over time.

• You begin to see each Note not as an isolated throwaway, but as a strategic tile in the mosaic of your body of work.

This is why I no longer post random thoughts, and it’s why my short form now works harder than my long form ever did.

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If you want to go deeper into this, I’ve developed the 15-Note System — a simple system for short-form writing that takes you from scattered thoughts to a sustainable rhythm that builds clarity of direction and creative momentum.

The Shift from Posting to Positioning

Once you understand short form as a worldview engine, something changes in the way you create. You’re no longer throwing words into the void, hoping one will stick. You’re placing deliberate stones, one after another, building a path that only you could walk. That’s the real shift.

Short form stops being a distraction from your “real” work and becomes the foundation of it. It’s the structure that holds your long-form essays, your products, your offers and your reputation. The part most people miss is the compounding effect.

When you write with this kind of intention every day, you give people a framework to interpret your work. You’re helping them internalise your language, your philosophy and your values.

Over time, that recognition hardens into trust, and trust is the only real currency online. The irony?

By the time you’ve built that trust, the growth you were chasing at the start becomes almost inevitable. Not because you “hacked the algorithm,” but because you built something too coherent, and too resonant to ignore.

That’s why I stopped posting random thoughts and it’s why my upcoming resource will go far deeper into this, showing you exactly how to build your own short-form system, one that grows your audience, sharpens your voice, and cements your position in the minds of the people you want to reach.

This isn’t just about Notes (a feature on substack that will keep continuously changing) It’s about building a body of work that speaks for you, even when you’re not in the room.

But for now, here’s the only thing you need to remember:

Stop posting random thoughts and start writing your way into clarity.

Thanks for reading. If you found this helpful please consider sharing it with someone else.

Take care,

Ben