Sam Rawlings

The Humble Email

2026-05-24T09:15:00Z

I’m staring at my Gmail window. It stares back at me. What confronts me are two or three vaguely related ideas, six half-finished sentences and structure that would send me back into year four. I’m trying to send an email in 2026.

Normally, I’d bypass all this rigmarole and put these half-baked ideas into Claude. Viola. I paste the perfect message back into the email and tell myself ‘That’s what I would’ve written if I had the time’. A lie of course.

But this time I’m trying to write one without AI.

Five minutes pass and I quickly realise I’m out of my depth. Hundreds of reps serving up half-finished junk to the model has trained my brain out of generating sentences, ordering ideas, and summarising points. It takes a while to activate my heavily atrophied mental muscles, and I finally get it sent.

Who am I? Why can’t I write a full email anymore? Put together a logical paragraph? Can I even conjure up a complete thought? Should a university graduate feel like this?

We’ve all felt the mental lethargy associated with our engagement with digital tools, but this feels different. It is no longer the google era, where we outsourced facts, figures and the occasional paragraph; we are outsourcing one of the most fundamental mechanisms of human thought. Writing.

"We simply do not know what we want to say until we have tried to say it" - Rachael Cayley

Great Related Links:

https://explorationsofstyle.com/2014/04/23/writing-as-thinking/

Putting Yourself Out There

2026-05-21T05:25:00Z

In under eights soccer, my Dad would only let us wear black footy boots. White boots are for kids who think they’re superstars, and colourful boots are completely out of the question. He would tell me “you wouldn’t want people to think you’re full of yourself”. The sub-text was loud and clear:

“Don’t put yourself out there”

Fast forward to grade 8 and I quickly learn that participating in cross-country or athletics day is ‘gay’. AFL? no. Soccer? no. Basketball at lunch? Embarrassing. Music or art? Absolutely not. Something like debating? Hilarious. Of course, the cool thing was sitting against a wall with your friends looking at your phone. I finish my schooling on the path of least judgement, always in a quiet desperation to do literally anything.

Then there are the broader cultural forces at play. Tall poppy is alive and well, conspiring against you to keep your talents inside. The social media industry hires the finest minds of our generation to hijack your attention; attention that could’ve been used to cultivate your talents and interests.

My personal journey with putting myself out has been a short one so far. Austin Kleon has a great book I’m reading called “Show your Work”. He points out that the real gap isn’t between being mediocre and being good, it is between doing nothing and doing something. Before you become good, you must first be mediocre. To be mediocre, you need to put something out there.

To succeed publicly, you have to fail publicly.

Anyway. It’s hard to put yourself out there. Do it regardless!

“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” – Charlie Chaplin

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and goto the grave with the song still in them” – Henry David Thoreau

Rationale

2026-05-20T04:14:00Z

Hello world. Testing Testing Testing