-Ben Franklin
Most productive work in society still comes from writing.
Writing code, emails, instructions, letters, product specs, scripts, wikis, decks. Writing is the best way to iterate on ideas. Oral tradition is deprecated. You need to get your ideas written down to be productive at scale.
There are a few professions that work without writing. Maybe networking professions like brokers. But they write to keep track of and in touch with contacts, and they have to work with lawyers on contracts. Audio and video are becoming more prevalent media formats, but those are derived from writing. Conversational podcasts can scale so that may be an exception to the rule. But even then, topics are generally scripted beforehand.
There’s beauty in improv. It’s fun and has moments of sheer genius. That said, there’s a reason almost no media is improv. There’s a reason most sales pitches aren’t improv. Improv doesn’t scale. Improv is great for iterating and trying new things. To refine a craft, one has to write.
Good writing leads to clear thinking. Sure, one can be a good writer and have awful ideas. But at least the awful ideas will be written and easily dissected. One could write about communism and how it’s never actually been tried and give examples how it’s better than capitalism in every way. It’s a bad thesis and obviously wrong to anyone who pays attention to history, but it can still be clear.
The most important thing I’ve done to improve myself these last few years has been writing an essay every week. Writing a unique piece makes you reflect. Writing makes you abstract. Proofreading your own writing makes you aware of what you’re saying. You have to be able to defend what you put out to the world.
Writing gets new ideas out. Your thoughts are safe in your head. But they’re generally mediocre at best. Written ideas are exposed, they can be challenged.
I wish our society was less judging of raw ideas. It’d allow people to iterate more on their deepest ideas instead of being afraid of shaming. A competitor’s founder recently wrote some insane theory about how Jews are trying to kill billions of people by distributing vaccines. And how Jews are coordinating with the FreeMasons. His email started off with:
“I write this email knowing that many of you will think I'm crazy after reading it. I believe there is a sadistic effort underway to euthanize the American people. It's obvious now. It's undeniable, yet no one is doing anything.”
Imagine if the first email he sent was to a friend who provided feedback. Maybe he surrounded himself with a bunch of crazy people. But I’m sure there are people in his life and people he could trust at his company who would have told him why he was wrong. I doubt everyone at Entrata believes in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Most bad ideas come from ideas festering inside our own heads for too long. We can create our own worlds. The best ideas aren’t fresh out of the womb. The best ideas come from real world feedback. They’re resilient. They’ve been torn down and built back up again.
We can have discussions in person to try and get to the truth. When done right, discussions help us gain empathy for the other side. When done wrong, they’re political performances marketed as debates. Political debates are easily digestible, but it’s not a way to get the truth. Even good faith debates aren’t the best way to get to the granular truth. Debates and discussions can lead us in the right direction, but the granular details need to be written out. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams proved this out in their later years with their letters where they debated and reflected upon their differences. Similarly, yet more contentious, were the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers.
The more we write and iterate on our writing, the more our ideas are flushed out. It’s deliberate practice for crafting ideas. This is done so rarely today that it’s obvious when talking to someone who has honed their ideas vs someone who recites what they read somewhere. Be the person who hones their ideas. Alter the matrix.