When your idol starts bleeding, he has one more thing to teach you.

Watch them carefully, eventually, they do it. Everyone.

For some time now I have been observing how my idols show themselves vulnerable.

I’ll tell you about my favorite writers, those who talk about writing. How to use it to create effective, strategic content aimed at building your online presence.

Many online writers are terrible. They are precisely the ones who do the most to help others. If I needed it, I wouldn’t even have them write me a shopping list.

Others, however, truly represent the excellence, the uniqueness they narrate in their stories, with speech that does not want to help but invokes motivation in the reader’s soul.

Well, the latter were my idols. I’m talking to you in the past tense because then something happened.

I read them for months, some even for years. With a perfect form, and unappealable syntax. A conceptual rigor that smelled of bleach and monastic walks. Unattainable, with that inaccessibility that is granted only to true consecrated masters.

I took notes as I read their posts, I noted the bright mental paths that I tried to intuit between the paragraphs, looking for a thread that united my disordered thoughts.

I was looking for suggestions, and a universal interpretation to use in each of my articles that would give me direct access to the readers’ emotions. Exactly like they were doing with mine.

Then, at a certain point, in some posts, I noticed tiny bleeding, which was promptly coagulated in subsequent tweets and other interventions.

Mine were just simple thoughts that crossed my attention, but the ferrous taste of blood is unmistakable.

Writing is unforgiving. You can pretend all you want, but eventually, it will expose you.

I began to notice the same scarlet sparkle more and more frequently. A widespread discomfort, of something that in the internal mechanism of my idols no longer worked as before.

I began to pay more attention to the matter, and every now and then, someone showed the same bleeding condition. Others, however, seemed unable to contain it, and with sudden specialist actions they modified their profiles with images with more trendy palettes, with more aggressive and incisive posts.

Still others, instead of running for cover with platelet copy, abandoned years of excellent blogging, in favor of illegible affiliation pages and comparisons of professional services.

The common impression I had was that of authors who, having reached a point in their professional ascent, had decided to slow down and start living on income. Thus abdicating their fundamental belief, according to which the reader should never be abandoned himself, or even worse, mocked with misleading content that says things different from what they say.

On the opposite side, and here I am talking about true excellence, some authors seemed to realize this professional drift that was beginning to afflict them, and they reacted with creativity.

Under the pressure of fierce competition, they retreated to the inertia that was engulfing them, with a return to simpler and more intuitive expressive schemes.

They had long since moved away from the public that needs to know how to do things, towards a more sophisticated and specialized user. Now they progressively modified their contents. They came back with short, less ethereal posts, almost intended for the new generation of junior copywriters.

The greatness that had chained me for months with assiduous reading was now contracted into banal articles on how to do it, almost as if to make up for the time that the idols recognized they had lost contemplating their own brilliant results achieved.

These are the bleeding of my idols that made me reflect.

Why did this happen, I wonder?

Are they tired of their job? Did they get burned? Or do they simply no longer believe in readers, in their intellectual abilities, and offer them quick and easy content, or simple monetization pages?

I’ll never know. Sure, each of them has their own motivations.

But with equal certainty, I know that it is very easy for an idol to suddenly find himself bleeding, without knowing how to stem the creative bleeding.

False idols always take themselves seriously and even pretend to themselves to be so.

True idols don’t know they are idols. When they become aware of it, they tremble. They fear they aren’t up to it. And they start bleeding.

What lesson can you learn from a bloody idol?

When you see your idol bleeding, they are showing their vulnerability.

It’s fallible. Something in his planning or motivation has gone awry, and he is turning inward. He is adapting to new needs. He is studying how to retrace his steps and renew himself with new enthusiasm.

He showed that he can be hurt.

If up until this moment, you felt intimidated by his greatness, now you know that he can be equaled and surpassed.

Now you know he can be hurt. And if he can get hurt, he can kill himself.

Now you know that he can no longer scare you.

Now you know that even your idol, in the evening, after dinner, has many thoughts about how to spend the day to come. In the shower, in the morning, he feels like a lion, and shortly after, at the keyboard, he doesn’t know which way to turn so as not to look at the white monitor.

When you see your idol bleeding, you are sure that in most cases he is mistreating his readers. He stopped giving them the same importance that he gave them months before. Or he simply abandoned them, in search of users who were easier to convince and with fewer demands.

When you see his ruby wound, your idol is teaching you one more thing: He’s begging you to respect the reader’s time with you and the words you write for him.