Why write?
- More People Should Write by James Somers
- My 12 Favorite Problems by Ted Gioia
- Writes and Write-Nots by Paul Graham
These pieces are about more than just writing — they’re about the importance of being preoccupied with a question. They are about creating clear unifying threads.
Writing is then the tool to grow, deepen, revise, and bat around our thinking over time
- How to think in writing by Henrik Karlsson
How to write?
- “The explicit point of a first draft is to get you to a second draft”
- Writing, Briefly by Paul Graham
- Six Rules for Rewriting by Michael Nielsen
- Executable strategy for writing by Andy Matuschak
Non-writing, writing
- Use Twitter to develop seeds, sharpen later via long form
- Have great conversations
How to use writing to learn?
Instead of diving into answering a question immediately, it’s usually more powerful to formulate a hypothesis first. This primes our brain to absorb information if the answer turns out differently from what we were expecting. Writing is an easy way to define these questions, preoccupations, and (as Richard Hamming would call them) “hooks”.
Then, once we learn, having written our hypothesis, we can now improve our intuition. When compared to a thought (which is easily influenced by hindsight bias), writing is immutable. This lets us reflect on why we were wrong, and what mistaken assumptions that led to our conclusion.
Our outputs and inputs are very much in conversation, and thinking and writing benefit from our milieu.