Prompts for saying what you actually think
Writing prompts for people who have something to say—but haven't said it yet
If you’ve been here for a while, you know I share journaling prompts every month. They’re internal by design, questions meant to help you make contact with yourself, notice patterns, track what’s shifting beneath the surface. That practice has become foundational for me, and I know many of you use those prompts the same way.
These are not those prompts.
The monthly prompts ask: What’s happening inside you?
These prompts ask: What do you actually think—and can you (will you?!) say it out loud?
The monthly prompts are for reflection. These prompts are for declaration.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between processing and declaring. Journaling is typically processing. It’s necessary, it’s clarifying, and it’s private. But there’s a different kind of clarity that only comes from taking a position and putting it somewhere other people can see it.
Not for engagement or “building an audience,” but because something changes when you stop circling an idea and actually commit to it… when you let the idea breathe and touch reality. Writing for yourself helps you understand what you think. Writing for others helps you decide what you think. The audience (even an imagined one) raises the stakes just enough that you can’t stay vague.
Most people have more opinions than they realize, they just haven’t been asked the right questions. Or they’ve been asked questions that let them stay comfortable—questions with easy answers, or safe answers, or answers that don’t require them to actually commit to anything.
These prompts don’t let you do that.
What these prompts are for.
I wrote these for a few different types of people, and you might be more than one of them:
The person who journals but never publishes.
You have notebooks full of thoughts, but the idea of putting any of it “out there” feels exposing, or pointless, or not quite right. These prompts are designed to create the bridge, to help you figure out which of your private thoughts might actually be worth saying publicly, and how to say them without performing.
The person who wants to write but doesn’t know what to write about.
You have the itch. You’ve maybe even started a Substack, a blog, or you have a notes app full of half-drafts, but when you sit down, everything feels either too obvious or too personal or too scattered to turn into an actual post. These prompts give you the angle—not just a topic, but a posture, a stance, a way in.
The person who has opinions but hasn’t committed to them.
You know what you think—about culture, about your industry, about how people live, about what’s broken and what works—but you’ve kept it to yourself. Maybe because you don’t want an argument, or because you’re not sure you’re “allowed” to have a certain take. These prompts are permission to stop hedging.
The person who doesn’t think of themselves as a writer.
These aren’t about becoming a writer, and you don’t have to publish anything. Some of the best uses for these prompts are private: figuring out what you actually believe, getting clear on the life you’ve built and why, understanding your own patterns well enough to articulate them. If something becomes a post, great. If it stays in your notes, that’s also great. The point is the clarity, not the content.
What’s inside:
Each part is a series of five questions.
Part I: What you actually believe → positions, opinions, the things you'd defend
Part II: How you actually live → systems, tradeoffs, reality vs. performance
Part III: What you've survived → specific experiences, turning points, what they taught you
Part IV: What you see that others don't → patterns, observations, the things you've noticed
Part V: The one you're avoiding → you already know exactly which one
How to use these.
Short answer: however you want.
Longer answer: you could pick one prompt and sit with it for twenty minutes and see what comes out, or you could scan the list and notice which one you’re avoiding (which is probably the one worth writing). You could use these to draft posts for your own Substack, or use them to prepare for a hard conversation, or to finally figure out what you think about something you’ve been circling for months.
Some of these will feel irrelevant to your life, that’s fine, just skip them. Some will hit a nerve. Write those first.
There’s no correct order, no schedule you need to follow, this isn’t meant to be an assignment. They’re just a few sets of questions that might help produce something useful, if you let them.
Part I: What you actually believe.
Most people don’t have opinions, they have vibes they’ve absorbed from their corner of the internet, or positions they’ve inherited from their social circle, or stances that are really just identity markers they call thoughts.
Having an actual belief—one you arrived at through experience and reflection, one you’d defend even if it cost you something—is rarer than it should be. And writing it down is even rarer, because the moment you commit a position to paper, you’ve created evidence. You’ve left a trail. You’ve made it possible to be wrong publicly, to be disagreed with, to be held to something.
We avoid this for good reason. Staying vague is safer, hedging is easier, saying “it’s complicated” lets you off the hook, but vagueness has a cost too… you end up not knowing what you actually think. You borrow positions instead of building them, you react instead of respond, and when someone finally asks you what you believe about something that matters, you realize you’ve never done the work to find out.
These prompts are about doing that work. Not to become someone with “hot takes” or to start arguments for sport, but because clarity about your own beliefs is a form of self-respect. If you don’t know what you think, you’re just narrating other people’s ideas back to them.
The point here is to say something definite enough that someone could disagree with you. That’s the bar. If everyone would nod along, you haven’t said anything yet.
Part I prompts —
The thing you’ve changed your mind about that cost you something.
Not a casual opinion update. A belief you held publicly (or maybe even built your identity around) that you had to abandon. What made you wrong? What did it cost to admit it? What do you believe now instead?
The advice everyone gives that you think is wrong.
Pick something people parrot without thinking: “Follow your passion.” “Set boundaries.” “Trust the process.” “Just be yourself.” And argue against it. Not as a contrarian pose, but as someone who’s lived the other side.
The hill you’ll die on (and why you shouldn’t have to defend it, but here we are).
What’s the position you hold that people treat as extreme, obvious, or offensive—but you think is just... correct? Make the case like you’re tired of qualifying it.
The unpopular opinion you’ve never posted because you don’t want the fight.
You know the one. The thing you believe about parenting, politics, money, relationships, health, ambition, culture, whatever—that you’ve kept out of your public persona. Write it like you’ve finally decided the silence is more expensive than the blowback.
What you know about your industry that everyone pretends isn’t true.
Every field has open secrets. The thing that’s obviously broken but no one names because naming it makes you inconvenient. Say it plainly. Don’t hedge.
And remember, you don’t have to share these! But chances are, simply writing them down will unlock new ideas for you.
Part II: How you actually live.
These are about the gap between performance and reality. Not confessional for confession’s sake, but honest in a way that’s potentially useful to someone else.
There’s the life you describe and the life you live, and for most people, there’s a gap—not because they’re liars, but because performance is the default mode. We talk about our habits, our systems, our values, and our priorities in aspirational terms. We describe the version we’re trying to be, or the version that sounds good, or the version we think we should be by now.
But the way you actually live—the way you spend your time, make decisions, structure your days, manage your money, maintain your relationships—that’s the truth. Not your intentions, or your patterns, or your goals. Your defaults.
This is harder to write about than opinions. Opinions are abstract; you can dress them up, qualify them, position them carefully. But describing how you actually live requires looking at the gap between your stated values and your revealed behavior. It requires admitting what you’ve figured out and what you haven’t. It requires telling the truth about tradeoffs instead of pretending you’ve optimized your way out of them.
The prompts in this section ask you to describe reality, not aspiration. What you’ve actually built, what it actually costs, what actually works for you. Not what’s supposed to work, not what worked for someone on a podcast, but what you’ve tested against your own life and found to be true.
If you write these honestly, they become useful to other people. Not as advice, but as data. Here’s one way a life can work, here’s what it looks like from the inside.
