Why I Bother To Write a Tiny, Obscure Newsletter About A Weird, Elitist Sport For a Limited Audience
I write an infrequent Substack Newsletter called 'Oscillations'. The audience is small. The focus is personal to me.
I write it in hope of extracting useful, universal nuggets from a lifetime spent messing about in boats. I grew up racing sailboats in Dublin - something I was very privileged to have been raised doing, in both senses of the word. I've been away from sailing for the last decade, a sport that used to consume and define my entire life (I even started in media as a sailing photographer). In that time, I've looked back on my time in that world from a totally different perspective, re-examining it in hindsight, asking a lot of questions. It taught me a ton, was hugely formative for me in many ways, and opened up a world of opportunity to me. It's also where I built many of my life-long friendships.
Tom Fitzpatrick & Dave McHugh sail their Helly Hansen-sponsored 470 Pic: Markham Nolan
The more I write it, the more I realise I’m doing it to be a better parent. I’m doing it because I believe that putting your kids in a boat is close to the best thing you can possibly do for them and I want to do it the right way. So as I explore my own victories, flaws and mis-steps through my life in boats, I’m actively trying to identify ways to be a better parent to my kids.
I grew up racing avidly and loving it. I was a nerdy kid, which fit – sailing competitively is highly technical. As well as being more physical than you might expect, it demands that you understand principles of fluid dynamics, physics, geometry, meteorology and psychology and weave them all together in real time while bumping over the surface of the sea. There are infinite combinations of variables to manage and their interrelations are very complex.
Being able to deal with that is, I think why there's a high correlation between good sailors and high achievers in life and business. A chunk of that off-the-water achievement correlates to privilege, obviously (In the US, even more so than in Europe). But overlapping that, I believe there's also a strong correlation between the patterns of thought, behaviors and analysis that you need to win on the water, and the behaviors that separate great sailors from their peers beyond the boat in shorelife.
For my own sake I started to revise key moments in my time on the water and what more I could extract from them with a little applied thought - something I had failed to do while younger. I made it public to hold myself to account a little; but also because writing for oneself is onanistic and largely pointless. What I'm doing here is pulling out frameworks to live by - hopefully others can find them useful, too. There may be a book in it, long term - who knows.
Writing for an audience also means you have to stand behind what you commit to pixels, and demands additional thought. You have to hold yourself to a higher standard. ALSO: writing about something inherently makes you think more deliberately about whatever it is you're describing. (On that, do listen to Brie Wolfson in this podcast from First Round Capital where she discusses the culture of writing and documentation at Stripe, and what it forces). I tend to be the person in the workplace who writes long documents, detailed emails, keeper of the Wiki. Writing helps me shape my thoughts.
The audience (again, do please sign up) has grown slowly, but the feedback from some of the posts has been fascinating. I've been written letters by former Olympians on their own thoughts of the intersection of on and off-water life, I've had people call me out for having changed because of my time in America (fair), and been told that my writing caused them to rethink their relationship with sailing and cost them a ton of money in the process.
I write about what I love so that more people might also discover it and get even a small fraction of what I have out of it. Because there is nothing— absolute nothing— half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
