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Why you should write

Everyone is full of ideas they’re not aware of - ideas they haven’t had time to crystallize because they haven’t been written down.

Trying to hold onto a thought in your mind is hard because other thoughts compete for the same head space and attention. This doesn’t give you enough room to really work with an idea, live and breathe in it and evaluate its merits.

These ideas usually manifest as intuition or gut feelings. Useful to get you a decision in spur of the moment situations and as a safety net, but not formed enough to use as a tool/model. You need to evaluate the benefits/tradeoffs of an idea, when it works and when it doesn’t work, and how to strengthen and nurture it. You can’t do this without writing them down.

Writing ideas down allows you to take a snapshot of that temporary moment and place it on paper, where it can be combined with other ideas, rotated, prodded for its limitations and where it needs to be strengthened.

Sometimes you write in order to figure out what you should write about. Sometimes you write to crystallize ideas and really get to the bottom of what they’re actually about

It’s really all part of the same process. In some instances, you’re surprised by how much you actually know about a topic. In other instances, you have to work to uncover how much you know about the topic.

Why Everyone Should Write by Morgan Housel @ CollaborativeFund

• “Sometimes writing is encouraging. You realize you understand a topic better than you thought. The process flushes out all kinds of other ideas you never knew you had hiding upstairs.”
• “Other times it’s painful. Forcing the logic of your thoughts into words can uncover the madness of your ideas. The holes. The flaws. The biases.”