If You Are Not Writing, You Are Not Thinking
Or, nothing helps you clarify your thoughts better than writing
đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
Itâs a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and lifeâs big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
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Iâve always struggled to write.
As a kid I wrote journals. It was fairly easy. I wrote about what was happening in my life and how I was dealing with them. Teenage stuff. In college, I wrote theses and research papers. They were fairly easy too. There was a predefined format I had to follow. All I had to do was list down my research, my process, and the outcome. Piece of cake.
Then I started writing opinions. My own. Original ones. It was when I started facing the real challenges. I struggled to structure my thoughts. I struggled to maintain the pace. I struggled to get rid of loopholes. I struggled to build a narrative. I often wandered off to other topics. It was impossible! I sporadically wrote and struggled for 2-3 years.
Often I didnât have much to write. Because I didnât have many thoughtful opinions in the first place. Everything I was thinking about was conventional. I just subscribed to one school of thought or the other. Nothing was original. I never challenged these ideas to see how strong they were. I wasnât writing because I wasnât thinking. I wasnât thinking because I wasnât reading; I wasnât observing; I wasnât questioning; I wasnât learning.
To add to my tragedy, I had always struggled to read as well. Even though reading 30+ books a year comes fairly easy to me now, it was next to impossible only a couple of years back. I started doing serious reading from 2015. By 2017 I had read close to 60 books. The books that blew me away were Nassim Nicholas Talebâs The Black Swan and Daniel Kahnemanâs Thinking, Fast and Slow. Suddenly I had all these unstructured information in my head I needed to organise so that I access them whenever required.
In mid-2017 I put my foot down and decided to write a piece week, no matter what! It was what I called, âselfish writingâ. I decided to write only for myself, and as long as this exercise helped me structure my thoughts, I was good. If others like what I write, it would be bonus. My goal was (still is) to write down the ideas I was reading/thinking aboutâin my own wordsâso that it cemented them in my head. It was The Feynman technique in action.
Even after 2â3 years of practice, itâs a pain to write. I struggle with it every week. But I do enjoy the process. Itâs very creative. It also helps me strengthen my thinking. That is very important for me.
I sincerely believe no matter which field you belong, few exercises help clarify your thoughts better than writing. Writing is the ultimate test of whether your thoughts make sense, or are merely unstructured and hazy feelings. Writing is the best way to question your notions and opinions in order to make them stronger. Writing is thinking on paper.
Putting your thoughts on paper forces you to look at them from a different perspective. Suddenly all the loopholes surface, and you come to realise how nonsensical, how baseless, or how irrational some ideas are. How you cannot come up with strong reasons to justify your opinion.
The smartest people I know are voracious readers. They donât necessarily read to find new information. They are looking for new perspectives. Or a new way of thinking about something they are already familiar with. But even if you develop new perspectives by reading, all of them lie in limbo inside your head. Writing them down brings them together, and suddenly you start to see how some of them fit together, while some donât. You are suddenly faced with the challenge of bringing them together so that you donât start contradicting yourself. You often meet dead ends when you start writing. There are moments of panic when you cannot piece something together. Then you have to start all over again. Writing is rewriting.
There are also moments when you realise you donât completely understand the topic well. It is when you have to think some more, read some more, brainstorm some more. Sometimes, you get a new perspective. Often, what you set to write doesnât seem to be true any more. What a bummer! It requires hard thinking to overcome these barriers. If you arenât writing, you arenât thinking.
Writing down your anxieties can help you tackle them better. Whatever is fuzzy and big in your head suddenly becomes compressed and clear on the paper. Writing freezes your thinking, and give you a framework to sharpen it wherever itâs blunt.
On top of that, writing makes you persuasive. If you know how to structure your thoughts and opinions, build a narrative, work out the loopholes, rebut the counters, iron out the creases, you have an edge over others.
Grinding through this process brings together new ideas that are often new discoveries to the reader. More than often, they are likely to be new discoveries to the writer as well. Like life, writing is like a box of chocolates. You never know what youâre gonna get. And by the time the writing is completeâbe it a book or an essayâitâs the writer who has learnt the most. If you arenât writing, you arenât learning.
Every day I struggle to put down ideas. Despite all the trouble, itâs worth it. Writingâs the best exercise for fulfilment, excitement, and clear thinking. If you arenât writing, you donât know what you are missing.
Howard Marksâ book The Most Important Thing is among the all-time best-selling investment books. Itâs based on memos Marks began sending to his clients in 1990. Funny enough, the memos spent most of their existence in obscurity, ignored by readers. âNot only did nobody say they thought it was good; nobody said, âI got it,ââ Marks recounted.
So why write in obscurity for a decade? âThe answer I think is that I was writing for myself. Number one, itâs creative, I enjoy the writing process. Number two I thought that the topics were interesting and that I wanted to put them on paper. Number three, writing makes you tighten up your thinking,âMarks explained.
Many of the good writers you know arenât much smarter than you. Theyâve just forced themselves through the process of transferring vague feelings into words, and the clarity that generates. To get off your feet, start off with some introspective questions: Whatâs your life philosophy? Whatâs your personal growth strategy? Why did you make that decision? How did you feel when that tactic didnât work? What have you changed your opinion about? Why? Youâll be amazed how much you can learn by writing things down, even if no one but you reads them.
Little Bit of Wisdom
All things in life produce success stories and failures. Itâs human nature to wish to copy success. However, the ironic truth is this: to accept success at face value without acknowledging the role of luck is a strategy for failure. But itâs also important to note that luck can be influenced. It requires dedication and effort. Apart from courage and conviction to act.
Interesting Finds
Reflections on Being a Female Founder â âWhen Tracy wakes up every morning, Tracy doesnât think, âOh, I am a female.â When I wake up in the morning I think, âWow, Iâve got a lot of work to do. I better get showered, caffeined up, and get my ass to work.â Then, when I became pregnant in 2017, my opinion changed. Women have different lived experiences than men, and not acknowledging this would be a disservice to humanity.â
Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope â âWhat has this pandemic confirmed or reinforced about your view of society? That capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labour.â
Our Remote Work Future is Going to Suck â âWhile the upsides to remote work are true, for many people remote work is a poison pill â one where you are given âcontrolâ in the name of productivity in exchange for some pretty nasty long-term effects.â
The list of all the articles Iâve written can be found here. And the past three editions of Sunday Wisdom are here: 46, 45, and 44.
What Iâm Reading
This week I finished Arnold Schwarzeneggerâs autobiography. It was an easy read. I found it thoroughly interesting. As a kid I was a huge fan of the Terminator movies so I was naturally fanboying when he mentioned how some of his iconic movies came to be. Apart from being a star bodybuilder and an action superstar, Arnold is also a shrewd businessmanâvery practical and methodical.
I loved the variety in my life. One day Iâd be in a meeting about developing an office building or a shopping centre, trying to maximise the space. The next day Iâd be talking to the publisher of my latest book about what photos needed to be in it. Next Iâd be working with Joe Weider on a cover story. Then Iâd be in meetings about a movie. Or Iâd be in Austria talking politics with Fredi Gerstl and his friends. Everything I did could have been my hobby. It was my hobby, in a way. I was passionate about all of it. My definition of living is to have excitement always; thatâs the difference between living and existing. I seldom saw my life as hectic.
His ambitious mindset, especially in his early days when he moved to America from a small village in Austria, is awe inspiring. If you need a role model for thinking big, look no further.
I Enjoyed Watching
Mathematics is The Sense You Never Knew You Had â âEddie Woo shares his passion for mathematics, declaring that âmathematics is a sense, just like sight and touchâ and one we can all embrace. Using surprising examples of geometry, he encourages everyone to seek out the patterns around us, for âa whole new way to see the world.ââ
Time: The History & Future of Everything â âTime makes sense in small pieces. But when you look at huge stretches of time, it almost impossible to wrap your head around things.â
DICKS: Do You Need to be One to be a Successful Leader? â âThis is a question that has been eating away at me for a long time, so I decided to make a movie about it. This is also the first video in a new series I am doing.â
Quote to Ponder
Theism is a deep-seated conviction that thereâs some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. It means thinking thereâs always going to be a babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves. Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.
â Pema ChĂśdrĂśn, When Things Fall Apart
Talk to Me
Send me tips, comments, questions, and your favourite writing tips: abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com. đ¤đ¤
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek đ
Thanks a lot for the newsletter! Very insightful points. I like your thoughts on writing. I wish more of us subscribed to this idea of making writing into a regular habit. I'm curious though. You mentioned that you struggle to write. I wonder how you've written 100+ articles. Also, any tips on building this habit? I myself have tried a lot, but this habit never really picked up.