I’ve spent a surprising amount of time trying to earn the right to write about things. Not formally. I’ve never sat down and decided I needed a credential before opening a blank document. But somewhere between having an idea and publishing it, a question usually creeps in:

Who am I to write about this?

It happened when I started a biotech newsletter. (Shoutout to Thinking Folds, gone but not forgotten).

The original idea was simple enough: I was just fascinated by what was happening and wanted to write from the perspective of someone trying to follow along. I wasn’t trying to be a scientist or pretend I understood every detail of drug development. That lasted for about five minutes.

Almost immediately, I fell into the wannabe-expert hole. Every article felt like it needed another ten articles behind it. Every sentence made me wonder whether someone smarter and more qualified would read it and realize I had no idea what I was talking about.

Eventually, I sold the newsletter and moved on.

Then there’s newsletter monetization. I’ve worked with newsletters for my entire career coming out of college — namely sales at The Peak and the ad network at beehiiv.

I spend most of my day thinking about advertisers, publishers, campaign performance, inventory, pricing, creative, and all the strange incentives holding the ecosystem together.

So you would think I’d feel reasonably confident talking about it. And sometimes I do.

Then I open LinkedIn or X/Twitter and see someone confidently explaining the future of newsletters in twelve perfectly formatted bullet points. They have a podcast, a consulting business, a chart I’ve never seen before, and “newsletter expert” somewhere in their bio.

And just like that, all of my confidence is gone.

They definitely know more than me, I think. Or at least they seem more comfortable saying they do.

And then there’s AI.

For a brief period, I thought it might be something I could write about. Then, seemingly overnight, everyone and their mother became an AI expert. New models, agents, workflows, prompt frameworks, automation stacks. By the time I understood one thing, someone was already explaining why it was obsolete.

That idea crashed and burned exceptionally fast.

I’m starting to think the problem wasn’t the topic. But the problem was I thought writing about something required me to become an expert in it first.

“Expert” feels like a claim that you’ve arrived somewhere. That you’ve gathered enough knowledge to speak from a position of authority. That you have the answers, or at least considerably more answers than everyone else.

And maybe that’s true for some people.

But most of the people I find genuinely interesting don’t seem overly concerned with proving how much they know. They are usually still asking questions. Still pulling on loose threads. Still willing to change their minds when they find something better.

So I’m trying out a different definition.

An expert is a curious person who becomes so interested in something that they spend an unreasonable amount of time researching it.

Not because they are trying to build a personal brand around it or trying to win an argument or they’ve reached the “end” of the subject.

But because they just keep returning to it.

Under that definition, expertise isn’t a title you give yourself. It’s a side effect of sustained curiosity.

This newsletter isn’t meant to prove I’m an expert in newsletters, AI, technology, coffee, work, or whatever else ends up here. It’s a place to write about the thoughts I keep returning to and the questions I wrestle with throughout the week.