Last Sunday I pulled a folder out from under my desk. It had been there since 2023, pushed against the wall behind a power strip, its top soft with dust. Inside was everything I’d prepared for a professional development training on neuroplasticity and educational leadership: the slides, my facilitator notes, the handouts.
I sat on the floor and started flipping through it, mostly to decide whether it could go in the recycling bin. Somewhere around the third page of notes, I stopped. The workshop was good. I mean really good, and I say that as someone whose first instinct with old work is to wince.
At the back were the participants’ feedback forms. One of them said this:
“Thank you for making me realize that I am not stuck! That I can change and rewire my brain and that I can go through life saying I GET to rather than I HAVE to.”
I read it twice and had to put the stack down in my lap. My chest went tight and warm at the same time, the way it does right before I cry. Someone had walked out of that room believing she could change because of something I made, and for three years it had been sitting under my desk.
Writing things down was never my problem. My notebook lives open on the kitchen counter with the pen resting in the crease, because ideas keep coming when they have somewhere to go. I believe that more than almost anything else I teach. Going back is the part I skip.
Maybe you have your own version of that counter: a notes app you’ve fed for years, or a drafts folder with forty half-titled posts. You got the ideas down. Then the pages filled up, the notebook went on a shelf, and nobody opened it again, including you.
Why your brain does this
In 2006, two neuroscientists, Nico Bunzeck and Emrah Düzel, scanned volunteers’ brains while showing them photographs. Some of the photographs were familiar and some were brand new. A region deep in the midbrain responded to novelty itself, and that response seemed to push the brain to go exploring for a reward. The researchers expected images that were only somewhat familiar to light that region up almost as much as new ones. They didn’t. Only the completely new images got the strong response. Düzel’s explanation stays with me: a new thing might hold a reward, and once the brain learns a familiar thing has none attached, it stops paying the same attention.
They were studying photographs, not essays. Still, I think the same wiring explains what happens to our own work. Nothing you will ever read is more familiar to you than the thing you wrote. You drafted it at 5 a.m., reread it on your phone in the school pickup line, fixed the second paragraph four times, and hit publish. By then your brain had filed it under known. A new idea feels electric, and a finished essay in your archive feels like furniture.
Your readers meet that essay for the first time. They get the spark you stopped getting months ago.
The three signs (& bonus)
I. Old work embarrasses you while strangers still find it useful.
You already know my version of this one. I was ready to recycle a folder that held a woman telling me she’d stopped living her life in “have to.” You measure old work against who you are now. Your reader measured it against what she needed the day she found it.
II. Someone quotes your own line back to you and you don’t recognize it.
A reader leaves a comment with a sentence she loved. You think, that’s good, who wrote that? It was you, eight months ago. Once a line is published, your brain stops giving it the attention it gives something new.
III. Your best performing post is almost a year old and you haven’t mentioned it in months.
Mine is “The 20-Minute Writing Exercise That Neuroscientists Say Can Solve Your Hardest Problems.” It brought in 1,918 new subscribers, more than three times any other post I’ve published, and it has been read over 250,000 times. I haven’t linked to it since July. The readers who found it this month have no idea it’s old. Yours might have 12 comments. It still found strangers who needed it.
Bonus: You’d rather build a new framework than teach the one you already use.
Building something new gives you the hit. Teaching what you’ve done for years feels like repeating yourself, even though everyone else would be hearing it for the first time. I’m not immune. My best performing post is about a writing exercise I do myself, the one that brought in more readers than anything else I’ve made, and I still let two months go by without pointing anyone back to it.
What’s sitting in your archive
Of the four, the bonus sign is the one I’d look at hardest. The thing you already use is probably teachable, and you’ve written about it more often than you think. It’s scattered across posts and replies to readers, and because you live inside it, it reads to you like how you get through the week. When I say teach, I mean anything that walks someone else through what you know: a guide, a post series, a talk, or a workshop. My neuroplasticity training looked like a dusty folder until I sat on the floor and read it.
When I read my own archive now, I listen for two things. The first is the sentence you toss away: a line tucked in the middle of a paragraph, written quickly, as if it barely counts. You rushed past it because it felt obvious to you, and it felt obvious because you’ve lived it for years. The second is the idea you apologize for before you say it. “This might be basic, but.” “I’m probably overthinking this.” “I don’t know if anyone needs this.” Whatever comes after the apology is usually the thing you care about most and are least ready to claim. Circle both. That’s where your teaching is hiding.
Over the past two years I’ve run more than 60 workshops, masterclasses, intensives, and cohorts with over 600 writers, creators, and coaches. The work I keep coming back to is helping people dig out what’s already in their archives and turn it into something they can teach.
Come dig with me on Sunday
Find the Gold in Your Archive of Work: an introductory workshop
Sunday, September 27, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, on Zoom. 75 minutes. A replay will be available if you can’t make it live.
Bring one thing from your archive: an old post, a notebook, or that folder you’ve been meaning to throw out. We’ll read it together the way a stranger would, and I’ll help you find the tossed sentence and the apologized idea in your own pages, where they’re hardest to see.
Then you’ll write it forward. You’ll write for seven minutes, by hand, in the present tense, with a date at the top. The scene you write takes place a few months from now, and in it you’re already teaching this thing. Write it down to the exact words someone says to you afterward.
You’ll leave knowing what’s been hiding in your archive, plus one sentence to say the next time someone asks what you teach, so you won’t need to ramble for three minutes.
Bring a pen, paper, and 75 minutes where nobody needs you.
Paid members of Courage to Create get in free, and your Zoom link will come by email. Everyone else can join the Courage to Create Academy and come as part of the membership, or buy a single seat for $57
Back to the counter
Keep the notebook open. Leave the pen in the crease. New ideas still need somewhere to land.
Then, tonight, pull one old notebook off the shelf. Open it somewhere in the middle and read it the way a stranger would, someone who has never met you and doesn’t know how the story ends. Notice which line makes you stop, and whether you want to argue with it or underline it.
Somewhere in there is a sentence a reader needs to hear for the first time, one that could move her from “I have to” to “I get to.”
If you’d like company while you look, I’ll be on Zoom Sunday at 4.
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