Why we should all write

Up until now I haven’t written much online. No posts on Facebook/Twitter, no blogs, not even comments on other people’s posts. I sometimes wonder why this is, considering I do spend a great deal of time each day consuming content online, and fine tuning my opinions on the topics I read about.

This year I’m hoping to begin writing. There are two reasons I’m hoping to do this. The first reason is to help clarify my thinking, and to develop fully thought-out, and defensible opinions on topics that matter to me. Ben Carlson of A Wealth of Common Sense wrote:

Documenting your thoughts and ideas is a great way to understand what it is you really think about something… It really is a great way to gather your thoughts and get better at figuring out how to say things in a more accessible, understandable way for both yourself and others.

I hope that writing will give me clearer thoughts on complex issues, and allow me to make better decisions in my career and personal life.

The second reason I wish to write is that there’s a small chance that one day some of what I write might create a positive impact to other people’s lives. The world is an broken place, and there a lot of people seeking to influence it for their own benefit. Successful people use a common tool we sometimes call “leverage”, which allows individuals to use limited resources to generate an outsized impact on the world around them. They can leverage technology (entrepreneurs/VCs), build an organization of people to leverage themselves (CEOs), use financial leverage (investors) etc. But one of the oldest and perhaps the greatest form of leverage is creating and spreading ideas. Writing and sharing ideas is how world’s great religions spread across the globe thousands of years ago, and continues to the the tool that today’s influencers use to successfully advance their ideas. “Normal” people regularly emerge from anonymity to make a positive impact just by writing something down. Once a word is written, there is no limit to how far it can spread. I seriously doubt anything I ever write will take off in a big way, but by writing my ideas down instead of just thinking about them in my head, I can rest assured that I’ve taken the right steps to at least create a small chance that my efforts could one day have an impact. (Said differently: because the potential benefit of writing is so large, creating even the tiniest chance of this happening is worthwhile).

The world’s opinions on important topics such as politics, business, and science are highly influenced by the messages put forward by a small group of powerful people in each field, the majority of whom are (not subtly) trying to advance their own interests. Where print journalism used to serve as a sensible gatekeeper to ideas decades ago, TV took over people’s attention and reduced complex issues into sound bites where ratings became the main content filter. When the internet caught on, this concept of ratings morphed into page views, which further devolved to reward catchy article titles over the actual content. In the latest trend, social media, things have regressed further as closed systems such as Facebook are overtaking the open internet and acting as a gatekeeper to ideas, only rewarding those who pay, and within that group, only showing you the viewpoints that your friends are sharing (that you likely already agree with). To make matters worse, social media also has a tendency to reward those who stir controversy and post frequently — the types of people who in my experience typically don’t have either the best intentions or the smartest ideas.

This leads us to a reality where people like Donald Trump will rise to power more frequently, and where bad ideas will gain an even wider following. Donald Trump is remarkable in that almost every one of his character traits is undesirable, and almost every one of his major policies directly opposes basic common sense (and in the case of his economic policies, basic math). So what is the solution to this backward dynamic? Can we somehow re-engineer the media to begin favoring well-intentioned people expressing clear ideas? Likely not, because the economic incentives of the media encourage the opposite. But what we can do however, is each one of us make the personal choice to be more engaged with the public discussion by simply writing down our thoughts in an effort to at least attempt to form clear opinions. If everybody makes even the slightest effort to think things through, our society would not be nearly as broken as it is today in many areas. And even if nobody ever reads any of this writing, at least we will know our own ideas are more clear, which leaves the a world with one more person who is less susceptible to the seductive half-baked ideas that we effortlessly consume on TV, in newspapers, and on social media (not just from Donald Trump, but also our friends who didn’t put the time in to think things through for themselves).

I realize that this post somehow turned from a short “hello world” post for my new Medium account to a tirade about the media…if anyone did happen to find this and read this far, I apologize!

Sources:
The Benefits of Writing (A Wealth of Common Sense)