How Sausages Are Made – About Writing

A SCARS Institute Personal Insight

An Insight into How We Do What We Do

Someone recently asked how we can possibly produce so much writing on so many different subjects. The answer is actually quite simple: we just do.

My background explains much of it. While still in high school, I worked as a journalist and photographer for the Oakland Tribune and also delivered news reports for KNBR radio in San Francisco. At sixteen years old, I was already earning a professional income doing journalism. More importantly, I was trained the old-fashioned way. My father was a career newspaper, radio, and television journalist. At one point, he even delivered national news broadcasts for ABC. The skills he developed over decades in journalism became the foundation of my own approach to writing.

Newspaper journalism teaches discipline. Writers learn to write quickly, write clearly, and write accurately. There is no time for endless revisions, so they learn to do it right the first time. A story is researched, written, reviewed by an editor if necessary, and then sent to press. Deadlines are measured in minutes, not days. That environment develops habits that remain for life.

One mistake many writers make is believing that writing itself is the primary skill. It is not. The primary skill is knowledge acquisition and learning how to stream onto paper or the screen. Experienced journalists understand that they must constantly learn. When a story arrives, they already possess a foundation of background knowledge, can rapidly acquire additional information, and then investigate the facts. The more knowledge a person possesses, the faster and more accurately they can write. The other secret is never stop writing.

Many people stop pursuing meaningful learning sometime in their twenties. I never did. I acquire knowledge the way a long-haul truck accumulates mileage. The commonly cited figure for acquiring expertise is roughly 10,000 hours of focused effort. Across my lifetime, I have invested that amount of time hundreds of  times over in the fields I know. As a result, when I sit down to write, I am rarely starting from scratch. The subject is already familiar. The structure has already formed. The tone has already been selected, whether the task involves a technical article, a meditation, educational content, or even song lyrics.

Writing is also a daily practice. I typically write between 10,000 and 25,000 words per day. Like any skill, writing improves through repetition. Thinking improves through repetition as well. Unfortunately, both skills are often neglected, which helps explain why so many people struggle with them.

Everything we publish is written by human beings. We do use grammar, spelling, and style-checking tools, just as professional writers have always used editors, dictionaries, and reference materials. We also use research tools to locate studies, verify facts, and gather citations when necessary.

In addition, we use proprietary AI tools that I have developed or have accounts for, for specific tasks. For example, AI can efficiently generate a glossary from an already completed article, saving considerable time on repetitive work. It is a useful tool when applied appropriately. Yes, software development and artificial intelligence are among my areas of expertise as well.

Those who search my background will discover a long history in technology. During the 1980s, I was Assist. Director of Corporate Research at Atari. I was an electronics engineer designing personal computers. I invented robotic products. I was certified in many disciplines, including quality assurance, computer science, and electronics manufacturing. I authored hundreds of video games, one of which was a top 5 best seller named “Topper.” During the 1990s, I invented and developed bestselling business software products, and launched what may be the world’s first major ecommerce website, TigerDirect.com (now out of business, but we raised it to billions annually in the U.S., Canada, and Europe). That work eventually led to artificial intelligence, systems design, and related fields. They are all processes, and process engineering was a skill I also learned early and is encoded in my DNA.

From 1998 through 2000, I reinvented the way pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices were tested in clinical trials. That technology is dominant now. In 2001 through 2003, I helped to author the United States schema for medical privacy, security, and data interchange under a regulation called HIPAA, and was the co-chairman of HCCO – one of the bodies that perfected these standards and regulation set. Similarly, I did the same for financial markets under GLBA. Today, I earn a living working for various think tanks. I hold an additional Ph.D. in finance and have been a professor teaching FinTech, now emeritus.

During the pandemic, I dedicated four years to the intensive study of psychology and neuroscience in order to better serve crime victims and survivors. I was not focused on a degree, I have enough of those, but on the knowledge and its application. Other members of our team pursued similar paths. Vianey Gonzalez, for example, completed her training and became a licensed psychologist. I have also authored or contributed to dozens of peer-reviewed and cited scientific papers and publications.

We are not amateurs. Our whole team has a unique collection of training, certifications, and skills that we apply to the work we do. I am a polymath.

Ultimately, the details of how we create content are less important than the content itself. The process is proprietary and reflects decades of accumulated experience, knowledge, training, research, technology, and professional practice. Anyone is free to verify the information we present, review the sources, and conduct independent research.

What matters most is that every message begins with human judgment, human knowledge, and human intent. The tools support the work, but they do not replace the people doing it.

In the end, the message is what matters. It is like sausages. They taste good, but don’t worry about how they are made. We make a lot of sausages. This has allowed us to educate millions of scam victims.

If you like what we do, then great; if not, there are other resources out there. You are here to learn our messaging, not our processes. Stay focused on your recovery.

We are not here to impress you; we are here to help you.

By the way, it only took 10 minutes to write this. This is how we do it. But, unfortunately, I have a degenerative neurological disease, so the accuracy of my typing is degrading – thank god for spell checkers!

Prof. (Emeritus) Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.
June 2026