Tell your story. In which medium? Just do it, already.

“Tell your story.” Medium asks.

Your story is overrated even before you started writing it. That said, those that write not only have some ability to spread the word with future generations, but also, as Paul Graham mentions here so directly, gives you a very much needed process/tool to train your mind. Organize your thoughts. Maybe define priorities.

The “spread the word with future generations” reference, nowadays is, in part, blocked by the medium you’re in:

• Who knows if it’s still around in a few years (this is Medium, so I automatically feel compelled to use bullet points).
• Even though Medium, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, now Threads, are tools that seem here to stay, there’s not such thing in the fast paced Internet world. Blogger blogs, somehow (it’s because they belong to Google, low maintenance, and so far weren’t axed), are still around and weren’t completely lost in time since the early 2000s.

That bet on the right medium to get your word to future generations was also really important in the Middle Ages. I’m always surprised that some of the most amazing, detailed, interesting texts about the Portuguese endeavours exploring the seas and in some ways the unknown in the XIV, XV, XVI centuries, were written by Genovese, Venetian, Dutch, English, German. There are a few reasons for that, including some secrecy necessary at the time. Even more so for a small country, with Castille kings in the back (yes, the Spanish if you want, but they we’re not Spain exactly at the time).

One of my favourites writers from that time wrote about the payed by the Crown of Castile, Magellan expedition. It was Venetian scholar and explorer Antonio Pigafetta, and its journal, later published as Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo.

There are whole civilizations with amazing achievements we don’t know about. When information, knowledge, and achievements weren’t spread around, some scientific discoveries from one age, had to be discovered many years later again, sometimes the hard way (for those who lived at that time).

More on this at a future time.