For a long time, Twenty & Thinking was two separate things that happened to share a name. On one side, there was the writing — essays and reporting I published on Medium because I needed somewhere to put the sentences that wouldn't leave me alone. On the other, there was LinkedIn, where I started breaking down how brands build their marketing strategy, one post at a time, because I was curious and stubborn enough to keep doing it after the first few posts went nowhere.
Neither one started as a plan. The writing came first, out of a habit of noticing things — a court case nobody was covering properly, a policy story that had been flattened into a headline, a feeling about the world that wouldn't resolve until I'd written my way through it. The marketing breakdowns came later, almost by accident: I'd catch myself reverse-engineering why a brand's campaign worked, or didn't, and it seemed wasteful to keep that thinking in a notes app instead of putting it somewhere people could argue with it.
What decoding brands taught me about decoding everything else
Publishing a strategy breakdown on LinkedIn is a specific kind of exposure. You're not reporting a fact you can footnote — you're making a claim about why a brand did what it did, and putting your name on that claim in public, in a feed full of people who actually work in marketing and will tell you when you're wrong. That discipline — say the specific thing, not the safe thing, and be ready to defend it — turned out to be exactly the discipline good journalism and good essay-writing need too. Every brand teardown I published was practice for every investigation I'd later report and every opinion piece I'd later argue.
It also taught me something about audiences that I didn't expect: people don't come back for hot takes, they come back for a consistent point of view applied honestly, post after post, brand after brand. That's the same thing a reader wants from a publication.
Why one project instead of two
For a while I kept the writing and the strategy work in separate lanes because it seemed tidier — journalism over here, marketing commentary over there. But the honest version is that they were never really separate. Both were about paying close attention to something in public and refusing to be lazy about the explanation. Twenty & Thinking, as it exists now, is what happens when I stop pretending those were two different projects. T-Square and the Journal hold the reporting and the essays. T² Studio holds the brand and marketing strategy breakdowns — Subway, Starbucks, Charcoal Eats and others — that started on LinkedIn and now have a permanent home here instead of disappearing into a feed after 48 hours.
What building this taught me about myself
Mostly, it taught me that I don't work well as a hobbyist. If I care about something, I want it to have a name, a shape and a place to grow — not a folder of drafts and a LinkedIn post history. Twenty & Thinking is that shape. It started because one person needed somewhere to think out loud. It's being built, section by section, into a house other writers, reporters and strategists can move into too.
If any part of this — the reporting, the essays, the brand strategy breakdowns — sounds like something you'd want to contribute to, the door is open. That's the whole point of building a house instead of keeping a personal blog.