The Importance of Writing

To write is to think

Writing is the forcing vector to articulate ideas in a more definitive way. It's not definitive as it is set in stone and it won't suffer changes, but it is rather captured at a point in time and goes from a fleeting point to really coming onto life.

An idea not written ceases to exist as soon as it is forgotten.

A written idea starts to live a life of its own. If it's written on a note that's then abandoned and forgotten about, it's futile. However, if the idea is revisited, shared, changed, branched into more thoughts, it can live on and on. It can be helpful to others in the long run. The act of writing allows an idea to unravel the whole thread of sub-ideas.

Most of insights and ideas happen during the process of writing. Complex thinking is not possible without external stimuli or tools. And writing with or to an audience is one of the most effective way of inducing clear thinking and motivation. The feedback process that can come afterwards is reshaping it with new experiences, so you can do it better.

Writing is a mean to understand yourself - to have a clear understanding towards your own thinking.

We do not have a "new" idea in a world where everything is a copy of something else. We keep saying "originality", but how do we know if anything is original? The discovery might exists without our knowledge, way before it has been "officially" discovered. Any progress emerges from the information and knowledge that already exists in the world, but the point is to connect the dots in such a way that the new creation will feel different. It might be different, I'm not saying that this is necessarily true or false, but I will treat any original idea with a grain of salt. We still have to write our own ideas, even if they've been said by other people in different or even similar ways.

We no longer lack the access to knowledge, we have eveything we need to know from anywhere we might be, but the actual challenge nowadays is to filter, sort and transform the pieces of data that we are overwhelmed with. To balance the data consumption and to make it relevant is definitely a journey and the only thing we can do is through continous creation. What we consume should be turned into notes and filtered with the experience we've accumulated to that point, because it seems that we tend to remember the information in a better way if we create a new version of it - our own version.

Writing offers a way to live beyond, which means that people will keep building on what you've already started. It doesn't matter how long your work will be a reference as long as it was at least once. The essence is how useful or groundbreaking your original work is, but you may never know that. And it's better to start.

Our natural fear of being judged leads most people to build, learn and think privately.[Seeking validation should not be the goal here.] Instead, the goal should be to tap into your network collective intelligence in order to create constructive feedback loops.

How do you measure your level of learning? The only way to learn publicly is to work on a project and to share your progress. Keeping a public log is an effective way of keeping track of your progress. You can go back to previous projects and measure the gap between your prior and your current level. In practice, we should share what we build often and early, not to wait until a project is polished in order to ask for feedback; seeking suggestions and feedback from your peers.

Once you've generated enough bad output, your brain will start to reflexively identify which elements causes the badness in the first place. Then it begins to avoid them.