Scott Galloway is a professor of Marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, the host of the Prof G and Pivot Podcasts and a best-selling author. His latest book is Notes on Being A Man.

He’s also published a newsletter nearly every Friday for the past 10 years. It’s called “No Mercy/No Malice.” (Or NM2 in Scott’s shorthand.) You can subscribe here.

It was originally a client engagement product for Scott’s company L2.

Before I sold L2, we’d launched a series of media products to create more engagement. Winners & Losers was a video series exploring innovation in the consumer sector, and NM2 was meant to be a newsletter exploring, well, whatever was on my mind that week. 

When Scott sold that company, the buyer didn’t want the newsletter. It was orphaned… it turned out pretty well:

NM2 was too salty for Gartner (the acquiring company), and they said it could not be affiliated with the firm, but I could have the IP. A decade later, we have 430k subscribers, and the newsletter is the center of the flywheel for ProfG Media. The tone/aim of NM2 is simple: provide insight and be fearless.

430k subscribers is quite impressive. But getting there took a lot of work. Pen to paper, week after week. I’m biased, but I love what Scott has to say about writing in his 10th anniversary post:

Writing is a full-body cognitive workout. And reps matter more than talent. Amen!

I may never get to 430K subscribers. Or even 43. But the process is good for my brain. And my heart.

Writing is becoming a lost art. You don’t have to be a pro to give it a go, though.

A good place to start is Julia Cameron’s “Morning Pages”:

You can learn more in Julia’s book The Artis’s Way. Or you can just do the morning pages.

You also can follow the guidance (and gusto) of Ray Bradbury in his book Zen in the Art of Writing.

Give it a shot. Your brain will pay you back.