Working in public is the closest thing to a reliable growth strategy that exists in this business.
Show the process. Share what you are figuring out. Let people watch the thing get made. It works because it gives strangers a reason to care before you ask them for anything, and because process is inherently more interesting than polished output. Nobody has ever forwarded a finished, perfect product to a friend with the words you have to see this. They forward the mess.
So yes, do it. Enthusiastically.
And also, please be careful, because I have watched people follow this advice off a cliff. There is a version of working in public where you slowly convert your entire life into raw material, including parts that belong to other people, and by the time you notice you cannot have a hard week without wondering how to frame it.
So let us find the line. It is not where most people think it is.
The line is not about how personal it is
Here is the common misunderstanding. People assume the boundary is about intimacy. Business stuff is fine, personal stuff is risky.
That is not it at all. Plenty of deeply personal writing is generous and appropriate, and plenty of business content is a violation. The real line is about who the sharing serves.
If you are sharing something because it will be useful to the person reading it, you are working in public.
If you are sharing something because you need something from the person reading it, you are using an audience as a support group. Reassurance, sympathy, validation, absolution.
Both are human. Only one belongs on your channels. The second one belongs with friends, family, peers, or a professional, and I say that with no judgment at all, because the impulse to reach for the audience when you are hurting is completely natural when the audience is the thing you spend all day with.
The test is not is this too personal. The test is who is this for.
Three questions before you post anything from your own life
A quick sequence I would run before publishing anything that involves your circumstances.
Is the lesson extractable? Can a reader take something away that helps them, even if their situation is nothing like yours? If you cannot name what somebody gets from it, you are probably processing rather than teaching, and processing in public has a cost.
Is it settled enough? This is the one people skip. There is an enormous difference between sharing a difficulty you are currently inside and sharing one you have come out the other side of. The second is generous. The first puts your readers in the awkward position of being unsure whether to help you.
My rough rule: wait until you know what happened. Not until it is resolved perfectly, but until you can describe it in the past tense with a point of view.
Would I be comfortable if this were the top result for my name in five years? Everything you publish is durable, indexable, and screenshotable. That is not a reason to be bland. It is a reason to be deliberate.
If a piece passes all three, publish it and enjoy it. If it fails one, it might be a diary entry, or a message to one friend, and both of those are legitimate and valuable places for words to go.
What is never yours to share
A firm list, and this is the part I feel strongest about, because these are the mistakes that damage other people rather than you.
Your members' private business. Somebody's struggle, their revenue, their situation, their question asked in confidence in a paid room. Not even anonymized, unless you have asked and they have said yes in plain words. Members share things in your community because they believe it is a room, not a stage. Turning their vulnerability into your content is the fastest way to make a community go silent, and people will not tell you why. They will just stop posting.
Your family's lives. Partners, children, parents. They did not choose a public life. Children in particular cannot consent to a permanent public record, and the fact that a story about them would perform well is not a reason.
Other people's identifying details. Photos with strangers in them, screenshots with names and handles visible, client work without permission, a colleague's account of something. If somebody is identifiable, ask first, every time, and take a no gracefully.
Anything that is actually private information. Financial account details, identity documents, addresses, health records, anything that could be used to impersonate or locate someone, including yourself. It is astonishing what ends up visible in a casually shared screenshot, so look at the whole image before it goes out.
And conversations. A direct message is a private communication. Publishing one, even to make a point you are entirely right about, tells everybody watching what happens to messages sent to you.
Sharing failure, which is the good stuff
The most valuable working in public content is almost always about something that went wrong, and it is also where people most often get the timing wrong.
So, specifics. Share failures after you understand them. Include the actual decision you made and why it seemed reasonable at the time, because that is the part that helps people. Include what you would do differently. And do not perform humility, which readers can smell instantly, and which turns a useful post into a strange little advertisement for your own growth mindset.
What to avoid: the live crisis post. If something is currently on fire, put it out first. There is a genre of content that is essentially somebody panicking in public and hoping for a hug, and while it often gets a lot of engagement, it costs the author something they usually do not notice until later, which is the sense that their difficulties belong to them.
Also avoid making your members responsible for your feelings about the business. Telling a paid community that numbers are down and you are worried puts them in a horrible position. They cannot help, they now feel guilty, and some of them will start wondering whether the place is about to close. Take that conversation to a peer.
The revenue report question
Somebody always asks whether to share numbers, so here is my honest view.
Sharing your own financial figures can be genuinely useful to other creators, because the industry is full of vague claims and short on real data. If you want to do it, do it precisely and boringly, with context about your costs, your hours, and how long it took.
But go in knowing three things. It changes how people relate to you, sometimes permanently. It invites a category of attention you cannot un invite, including people who will use your numbers to judge themselves harshly. And it is very hard to stop once you start, because the absence of the next report becomes its own story.
Also, and this is practical rather than philosophical, never publish anything that reveals account details, and be careful about revealing information that identifies specific clients or members from context. Aggregate is fine. Traceable is not.
If you decide against it, you owe nobody an explanation. Financial privacy is completely normal, and the pressure to be transparent about money is a fashion rather than an obligation.
Build a sustainable rhythm instead of a confessional habit
Here is the structural fix that makes all of this easier: decide in advance what parts of your work you share, so you are not making the decision emotionally in the moment.
For example, you might decide that you share what you are building, what you are reading, what you tried that did not work, and what you are learning about your craft. And that you do not share your income, your household, your health, or anything from inside the paid community.
Write that down. Two lists. Then the question when you sit down to post is not how much of myself should I give away today, which is an exhausting question to answer three times a week. It is simply what have I got from the first list.
That single document is what separates creators who work in public sustainably for a decade from creators who burn through their own privacy in eighteen months and then go quiet.
What I actually want to encourage
I have spent most of this piece drawing lines, so let me be clear about the upside, because I do not want you to read this and retreat into publishing nothing but tidy conclusions.
The unfinished, uncertain, in progress version of your work is the most interesting thing you have. Show the draft. Show the thing that broke. Show yourself changing your mind, thinking out loud, asking a question you probably should already know the answer to. That is what makes people feel like they know you, and feeling like they know you is the entire foundation of a community.
You can be genuinely open about your work while keeping your life your own. Those two things are not in tension, and the creators I most admire manage both without any apparent effort, because they decided the boundaries once and then stopped thinking about it.
Be generous with the process. Be private about the parts that are nobody's business. Both at once, cheerfully, for years.
Do this this week
Write the two lists. Things I share, things I do not. Ten minutes, and keep it where you write.
Then go back through your last month of posts and check for anything that came from inside your paid community without permission. If you find something, delete it or edit it, and if it identified somebody, tell them and apologize plainly.
Then publish one thing from the first list that you have been slightly nervous about, and notice that it was the useful kind of nervous.
That is the whole discipline. Open about the work, quiet about the rest, decided in advance so you never have to negotiate with yourself at midnight.