Want to write more?
Why write?
Writing forces you to pay attention.
Every experience doubles as a potential future sentence. When you know you’re going to write, you change how you live. It takes you to a higher level of perception. The world pops and ideas spring to life.
You read differently; you think differently; you listen differently.
Writing is the best kind of networking.
I love this advice from Andrew Chen: “Writing is the most scalable professional networking activity. Stay home, don’t go to events/conferences, and just put ideas down.”
Note: You can find my complete writing guide here.
Creation is the most valuable part of learning.
Start remixing ideas.
Remixing ideas forces you to think clearly. As a wise man once said: “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”
Getting started is the most important thing.
As Paul Graham says: Expect 80% of the ideas in an article to come after you start writing it. Most people spend too much time consuming and not enough producing. Consumption is our default setting. It’s a systemic issue — there’s always more to consume. It’s so easy.
Originality is over-rated.
Many of the most popular people on the internet simply remix information. When this happens, everybody wins: Readers get to learn, you get website traffic, and authors get more visibility. Take existing ideas and remix them in productive ways.
This is the secret to Jordan Peterson’s success. He makes important ideas easy-to-understand. He re-packages old ideas and makes them modern.
The most interesting examples:
- The Bible
- Carl Jung
- Nietzche
By doing so, he’s changed millions of lives.
Re-combining ideas is powerful.
Especially when they come from a variety of areas.
Walter Isaacson was once asked about creativity. He said: “People who are interested in the widest variety of things tend to see the patterns of nature in ways that make them creative.”
Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas — it generates them. Writing is thinking. Writing is learning.
When you have free time, have a bias towards writing.
