This week, Crossroad: Where Ideas Meet celebrates its first anniversary. To mark the occasion, I’m not sharing a post on history or data science. Instead, I want to reflect on what I've learned from a year of writing simply for the joy of it, with no monetary incentives in sight. It's a journey that has led to some surprising discoveries about creativity, laziness, and the real meaning of audience.
For regular readers, you'll know my posts are typically structured along three axes:
History
Data Science - Machine learning
Finance/Economics
But this very year 2025 a new axis that emerged by itself:
My own essays
I don’t know how to describe them but they are more personal views and reflections about our society. As I say they are the result of my views formed after talking with people, they are far from an objective truth. But, dear reader, it should make you think.
My Process: From Idea to (Unfnished) Drafts
In the previous paragraph I wrote:
But this very year 2025 a new axis that emerged by itself:
Note I use the word emerged. Like if it came from deep down my brain until arriving to the screen. Without plan, just crawling all the way up until reaching the surface.
So I wanted to spend some time here thinking about why it happened.
Remember my goal with this newsletter is not to make money or get views, but to document cool things I see through my day-to-day life. Yes, like a diary. So, basically I do my normal life and when I consider something it’s worth to write about I start a draft about it. Given how different we all are and how different contexts we are in, you will be surprised if you start just jotting down for fun interesting things about your day. You will see how life is far from being dull. There are plenty of rabbit holes all around us; you just need to pay attention. And as it happens writing helps a lot. I already have an article about this and other to follow:
OK, going back to my modus operandi. Initially every draft was equal a post and I didn’t have too much backlog to review. If I have notes I would develop them far because there weren’t so many.
Right now, the number of unfinished drafts is roughly equal to the number of published posts. I don't see as a failure but as evidence of an acquired skill: the ability to read, process and identify an idea worth pursuing. The challenge comes later.
Which it’s not a trivial thing. However, when you start taking notes, you will see that there are too many interesting things in this universe and moreover, you are one of them. Last sentemce illustrates the consequence of my current state. As I explained the number of drafts I’ll have will explode as time advances.
It is a simple physical reality that I don’t have enough time to finish them faster than new ideas appear (right now). But … is this really true? How many times have you heard or said the previous sentence?
In my case, I deeply think it’s wrong. My issue is laziness. I’ll explain you why.
You might think the solution is to force a schedule. I tried that at the beginning, but it felt hollow. My solution has been a flexible deadline: publish within two weeks, but honor the creative sprees when they come. This tells me the issue isn't a lack of discipline, but something else...
It’s a daring thing to say given that I am writing for pleasure. No? Well… before I explained how I come with the ideas and what i do with them. Now the key is what happens after. An idea can be a title, a picture, some paragraph read online or some quote.
And then you need to develop it. You may be tempted to think that laziness becomes the strongest here. But you will be wrong (at least in my case).
Honestly, for me, writing feels like the tides. I might write this entire article in two hours one morning, and then for a whole week not find the inner peace to string two sentences together. I know I'm not alone in this feeling.
For me, the problem is the final touch. The last reads. Maybe the last big 20 modifications. There is a world between unconnected ideas, and an article.
Is it too long? Is it boring? Are there blatant coherence problems? is it readable?
Interesting to see that the issue is finishing. Not so much starting to write or developing ideas, but terminating them. Maybe this have a projection into life also.
The human connection discovery
One thing that genuinely surprised me this year was realizing there are more people reaching out to talk about my pieces than I have subscribers.
At first, I thought this was odd. Shouldn't the most engaged readers be the ones who subscribe? But then I understood something deeper: behind every visualization stat, there is a human.
These conversations happen in unexpected places - someone mentions an article at a birthday, another sends a message on WhatsApp, a colleague references something I wrote months ago. The newsletter format captures subscribers, but the ideas travel much further than any dashboard can track.
And the cool part is that they are totally unexpected!
Future Improvments
One idea I had since the beggining was to give the trasncription to some TTS model to generate an audio/podcast of the article.
I think it’s a really cool idea not only for those that prefer to listen over read but also for those who may have vision impairment.
Expect this to be implemented soon…
This wraps up the article, where I have shared with you my journey and what I have learnt in this first year. It is a rather short article (around 5 mins to read) so its perfect for summer time. As always, thank you for reading!
See you next time.