I was entering 7th grade and there was a power vacuum in my Boy Scout (now Scouting America) Troop. Some of the kids aged out, but there were a bunch of high schoolers who were quitting. There was a new Scoutmaster, and it was no longer Lord of the Flies on camping trips. My two best friends in the troop approached me: One of them wanted to run the troop (as Senior Patrol Leader, or ‘SPL’), and the other wanted to be his assistant (ASPL). Would I support them in the election? What role would I want?

I remember where I was standing. I remember how quickly I understood the score — with my support it was locked up. We were the three who could do it, and I’d been the Patrol Leader of our “new scout” patrol for the previous year, so you could argue I had the edge. Would I fall in line or contest it?

“Scribe.”

The role of troop secretary was not a coveted one. I probably could’ve gotten it just by raising my hand anyway. But I’d read the job description and I knew part of the expectation was writing a newsletter, something that had never happened in our troop to my knowledge. And so I traded risking my friendship through ambition for a weird opportunity because I was curious. Wasn’t “Secretary” like a third-in-command in clubs? Sounded like a safe place to start. I didn’t enjoy the spotlight anyway.

The next month, I started a monthly 4-page newsletter — “The Rebel” — on the family PC with a writing app that came on floppy disks, complete with a banner made of a carefully selected font and clip art. My dad made 50 copies of it every month at his office job after we worked out how to make it double-sided.

It faithfully recounted important troop information, but also included op-eds, jokes, and even pirated comics early on. It took a deeply irreverent tone, but was never disrespectful or dismissive. I’d already learned how to tread that line and set about perfecting it. The other scouts enjoyed it, which was gratifying. But the parents adored it, which I found baffling at the time.

It ran for 50 issues, which was my entire remaining scouting career, and many years after I was last the Scribe. I offered it to every subsequent person in the role, and only the very last one, at my retirement from the troop, wanted to try. I suspect he mostly did it for me, and it was gone within a year. It turns out that writing a 4-page newsletter every month for 9 months out of the year is a lot of extra work in a troop that was very active.

I taught me more about the power of words than a lifetime of English classes combined.

I went on to be the SPL the following year. My friends dropped out of scouting as we entered high school, but I continued to lead my troop in various capacities through graduation. I helped run a weeklong district-wide (multi-county) leadership training camp, then came back the next year to lead it myself. I turned 18 that week in the woods, running a 6-day program with 50 boys from around the state and a staff of six. Every morning of that week I wrote a newsletter on a computer held together by duct tape and distributed copies to each patrol at lunch. With a well-planned program and our words, we built a durable community in days.

In my freshman year of college, I restarted the defunct newspaper with a new friend who aspired to the Editor-In-Chief role. I took Design Editor, a post I held all four years. I wrote a column for the back page — “The Random Eleven” — that irreverently poked fun at the administration and current events through 11 quippy non-sequiturs every two weeks. The college Provost and President knew my name. “The Random Eleven guy?” was how I met staff and faculty. They were good sports.

When it was time to merge the staff of our two core technology labs on campus late in fall semester our junior year, that same friend and I had to negotiate who would run the combined lab. It was generally not considered ideal to manage a lab your senior year, but I made the proposal: You run it for the rest of this year, I’ll take over next year.

It was a brilliant choice that led to lifelong friendships, getting caught up in college executive politics, budgetary horse trading, and navigating the employee/employer role for the first time with a dozen folks of incredibly different skills and interest levels. I got a full year at the height of my college experience to figure out how to communicate with a staff effectively as we continued to change and evolve.

When the small Web community I’d joined my freshman year of college was hacked, I took a “next-in-command” role after the three new founders. What did I take on? Organizing people through outreach and announcements; figuring out what was next and rallying our community to get it done.

When the Chief of Staff at a previous startup resigned after 6 years, I offered to take minutes of the executive team meetings. The founder told me, unsolicited, “These minutes are incredible, it’s like re-living the meeting but only the parts that mattered.” He was surprised, because I was hired to run engineering, a technical role, not a wordsmith. But while I’ve been coding nearly as long as I’ve been writing minutes and leading teams, I’ve never considered it the more valuable skillset.

There comes a time when your code has done all it can. There comes a time you’re as good as you’re going to be at any particular programming language, or in any particular tech stack. That time never comes when your practice is leadership and communication. The depth of the challenge is infinite, and the impact scales with it.

The next Chief of Staff used an “AI” plugin to summarize meetings for efficiency. Everyone stopped reading them.

I was once told by a CEO that he “wasn’t a titles person.” That’s a pleasant fiction for someone for whom power is a given, and it’s a trap I have stepped in myself. You don’t understand your own power because you’re not exerting it over yourself, and so you dismiss it and accidentally create conflict and dissonance. I learned early that most folks are very much titles people, and it colors every word spoken.

Having a title that makes you a stakeholder but keeps you outside the official chain-of-command; that gives you a seat at the table but not a decisive vote; not the official voice but a platform from which to shape communications of an organization; those done skillfully can be far more impactful than someone wielding direct power clumsily. The details really do matter.

Twenty years later in our Web community, I was the last one standing among the founders, the new “benevolent dictator for life,” a title I never wanted. In response, I learned how to write Bylaws and turn it into a social club. When it was time to form the Board a year ago, all eyes were on me for officer positions. What role did I have in mind?

“I’d very much enjoy being Secretary.”

When the titular character in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, recounting his own life in Hurricane, sings “I wrote financial systems into existence,” I did not hear it as hyperbole. There is unique power in the written word. I remember every hallway discussion where I traded on it. I have practiced it my whole life. I have seen it happen. I have made it happen.

Beware of those peddling technology demanding you cede it.