Last fall, I wrote an essay called “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox” (henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/se…) It was about how putting your work out on the internet helps you attract people who can help you evolve and grow into a better version of yourself.

For this to work, your writing needs to be at the edge of your knowledge, it needs to address the most fascinating people you know or can imagine. That is: you need to write up. If you don’t do that, if you write down to an audience who you treat as lower than you, as a group of people you need to educate or entertain, then, well, you will attract people like that—and they will not help you grow.

This is true not only when writing blog posts. It applies to any work you do in public. From the essay I linked above:

It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.

To use Twitter as a tool to grow and attract a network that challenges you, you need to write up. If you go to a party and want to meet interesting people, you need to “write up,” you need to say not the things that will be accepted by your old friends but the things that excite you now. If you write down, you risk attracting and maintaining a social context that will hold you back.

Writing up is hard to do. The incentives are against it.

When people gain status it is common to see them gradually shift toward writing down. They become stale public intellectuals, caricatures of themselves. I understand them a bit better now. It is nerve-wracking to write upwards when you get a larger audience. There are only about 5,800 subscriber list. But it is, I’ve noticed, very unpleasant to write something that I fear might not be appreciated by 5,800 people. I don’t want to let down the people who give me of their time, so I feel inclined to play it safe, repeating what I know works, instead of risking everything by going out toward the unknown—which is what you have to do to write up. Always leave the stable ground behind.

But if I give in to that, if I shift the aim of my writing downward, I effectively lock in my personal growth.