The unreasonable effectiveness of writing
Writing is the ultimate form of thinking: it catches lazy arguments, expands your ability to hold complex ideas, and clones your thoughts to train them faster and harder than any other means
The legendary investor Warren Buffett will often say that his greatest investment was the Dale Carnegie public-speaking course he took in college. Even if they decide to take Buffett's advice seriously, most people will spend their time learning to speak well (which is important), but completely forgo learning how to write well.
This is a mistake. With each passing day, I become more convinced that effective writing is a superpower.
I call it “the unreasonable effectiveness of writing.”
Writing as metacognition
My ideas follow a very specific lifecycle. An idea will advance through three different venues, each more rigorous than the last: the mind, conversation, and writing.
Whenever I have a random idea pop into my head, I'll spend some time thinking about it. If the idea passes basic filtering and I deem it interesting, I will spend time talking about it with my friends. The goal here is to articulate the idea into a clear point, thus freeing it from the nebulous tyranny of my mind.
If I'm able to articulate the idea sufficiently in conversation (and it passes initial critique and questioning from my friends), it moves onto the final stage: writing.
Writing is brutal because it is unforgiving and reveals holes in my thinking. Often, I'll try to translate something I spoke about into an essay, and then realize I relied on far too many leaps of logic and hand-wavy arguments. As Richard Feynman famously quipped, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Fundamentally, I believe clarity of language is clarity of thought.
The words we select are a mirror to our thinking. It's easy to let hand-wavy formulations and arguments pass by in a conversation, but it becomes much more difficult to do so in writing if you're being intellectually honest.
The nature of writing is that it allows us to explicitly render our language onto a piece of paper that we can then scrutinize and rework deliberately. This was Jeff Bezos' logic when he banned PowerPoints at Amazon, requiring employees to submit six-page written memos instead. Writing is our best guard to catch lazy thinking.
But writing is not only to avoid fooling ourselves but also for expanding our ability to think. In a previous piece on why memory matters, I pointed out that developing complex and useful insights is predicated on being able to hold and manipulate multiple ideas in your working memory. Through the writing process, these abstractions and formalisms are reworked to incorporate a higher density of insight.
Writing, in its revealing and brutal honesty, provides a perfect substrate to manipulate and combine ideas to compress them further into tighter and cleaner representations.
Then the cycle continues ad infinitum as we think further and further, better and better.
Writing as leverage
When I was a kid, one of my favorite shows to watch was the anime Naruto.1 The rough tldr of Naruto is that it's a classic hero's journey arc where the protagonist struggles to gain acceptance in his community, with the extra wrinkle that it's set in a land where ninjas have superpowers.
One of Naruto's abilities is the "shadow clone jutsu," which allows him to create temporary fully-functional clones of himself, drastically improving his training and learning rate (he was one of the first people to realize that learning is driven by the number of iterations). I always thought his ability to create clones was the coolest thing ever.
When you write essays, you're taking your ideas and decomposing them into words. Through the magic of the Internet, these pieces are instantaneously duplicated and distributed to other people throughout the world.2 People asynchronously engage with your ideas and provide feedback, helping to strengthen and train your ideas.
It's almost like writing allows you to clone your ideas, and then train your ideas faster and harder than you could by other means. What I'm saying is that if you write well, you too can be like Naruto.
In most work, your inputs are tied closely to your outputs — in other words, there is no leverage. Writing displays ultimate leverage because the Internet has created an infinitely cheap distribution mechanism.3 In this vein, writing well is more important than speaking well because it is the most scalable form of communication. Just like how code is read many more times than it is written, what you write is read many more times than the one time it was written.
Good writing is a magnet for opportunities. Writing gives your ideas wings, allowing your ideas to fly through the rest of the world and to explore the space of other ideas and possibilities.
To this day, it's still one of my favorite shows. You'd be surprised how much incredible world-building and poignant ideas there are in the show.
I know I'm skipping a lot of steps here, but that's basically how it works. Internet, algorithms, and a bit of magic mixed in.
As a tech person™, I'm contractually obligated to worship at the altar of “scale.”