Every once in a while, something happens that fundamentally shifts my thinking. Most recently, it was a conversation with a friend. It was one of those chats where you talk about everything and anything under the sun. Both of you trying to truth seek and offer advice where useful. One of the things I realized, was that ideas are sharpened when they're exchanged. Having a conversation with someone is like passing your words through layers of filters. Like water being purified, ideas are refined through mutual exchange. That helps explain a lot about why writing leads to clear thinking.
What if in actuality, writing is just the process people happen to follow when they want to exchange their ideas at scale? That would lead to a lot of filtering in a way that doesn't happen in a 1:1 dialogue. Maybe this is obvious to other people, but it wasn't to me.
My mental model for how the world worked was:
The truth of the matter though, is that writing is just a first attempt at trying to explain your perspective. Viewed from that lens, it doesn't just magically transform the way you think about things. Instead, it clarifies the intensity and the strength of your initial position on a given topic. That forms a baseline to grow and expand from.
The (relatively) new model I have:
Sometimes, that growth happens with just yourself. You review what you've read, and try to find the holes in the argument. You debate the merit of certain word choice and flow. If you're really good, you throw out ideas entirely and add new ones to make your argument more cohesive. Put another way, you have a conversation with yourself.
That's an important takeaway because it means that you should be optimizing not for the writing process itself, but the content of the writing. Concretely, it means that rather than trying to write as a self fulfilling process, it's better to change the frame of writing to be default draft. That means that no idea in writing is ever fully polished. There's always a revision waiting to be made in the margins.
That being said, writing is still pretty hard.
That's because writing reveals your flaws. It shows you where your fundamental understanding lacks support. So too does conversation with the right person. That's because both are methods of explanation. There are two moments where we often feel lacking in explanation. The first is when asked to describe something that you thought you understood, but actually don't. And the other is trying to explain a topic you understand well, with someone who understands it better. In both cases, there's a gap between what you think you should be able to explain, and what you actually can. The size of the gap matters less than knowing that it exists. To know that it exists, you have to explain. One way to explain, at scale, is to write.
This is also what makes writing such a vulnerable practice. It's not just that you're putting yourself out there. It's the fact that you're putting your ideas out into the world for others to judge. That's a scary place to operate at scale. When you talk to your friends, you can feel comfortable knowing that your ideas are safe, but when you write, you open yourself to the criticism of the crowd.
I suspect most people don't care to interrogate themselves in this way. They're reluctant to admit to being wrong. Yet, the beauty of viewing writing as default draft is that your model can always be updated.
Writing also forces you to explain what you know in finite terms. The finite part matters a lot because in conversation, you feign intelligence by being the last person to speak. In writing, you have no choice but to pick a subset of the ideas you will eventually communicate. That constraint is hard to maintain while also being clear and focused in your thought process.
So, like with all things in life, writing is nuanced. It's a communication method for sharing your ideas with lots of people. But it is also that same fact that makes it one of the hardest things to do. When I first started writing on the internet, I just wanted to get more ideas out there. I thought I would write better, and think better as a result. What I learned is that my ideas are only as good as the filtering they're done through. That filtering happens anytime I get to explain myself. And what better way to explain myself, than to write to you?