"This is hard," Ed White's friend texted him. He was about to publish his first piece of writing, and the discomfort of putting it out into the world for anyone to read was setting in.
There are many barriers to developing that skill of storytelling. Ed would know. He's been in the profession for more than 12 years, first as a writer at publications like the Financial Times, Wired, and Contagious, and now as a Senior Design Director at IDEO, where he co-leads the firm's AI portfolio across Europe.
"People suffer from both a fear of the blank page and from feeling judged," he notes about the emotion tied up in the process of crafting a story. He's felt it himself: "I was terrified of my first pieces of writing and how they would be perceived."
The good news, he says, is that sharing with AI and using it as your editor can lower the barrier to entry. It can give people enough confidence to take that first step and keep going after it. And that matters, because a great idea that isn't communicated well is unlikely to survive.
