Writing is the first thing I remember falling in love with: I started creating stories in kindergarten, and I’ve never stopped since—it’s just that the stories have, for the most part, become fictional and contain more numbers.
I love writing because I love thinking, and writing is simply thinking across time. In fact, my writing practice is strongly tied to knowledge management.
If you want to write more but don’t know where to start, I strongly recommend The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online (opens in new tab).
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How far along an idea is, from 🌱 rough to 🌿 developing to 🌳 mature.
Our brains are good at thinking moment to moment, but not over time, especially across days and weeks and months. Writing helps us think better because it allows us to think across time. At any moment, our minds can only hold and connect a handful of related ideas and memories. When we try to multiply big numbers in our head or understand complex situations, that limitation we run into is the limitation of how much we can think at once – we can only think a few thoughts clearly at once, so to create vast maps of ideas, we need a larger surface. When we take notes, we render our thoughts onto paper so that we can hold onto them even when they aren’t at the top of our minds. We can lay out a hundred different ideas on paper and move them around to connect them and group them easily.
The best pieces of writing have three traits in common. They are:
All good non-fiction pieces are centered around a shiny dime, i.e., the core thesis, idea, or takeaway you want to explore. It’s the kernel that you cannot take away from the piece without killing it.
Only you know what a “good life” means. Don’t let others define it for you.
There are three types of non-fiction works:
People struggle to write because they sit down in front of a blank page and try to come up with a brand-new thought on the spot. This is a recipe for frustration.
