Writing to understand yourself

How getting your thoughts down on paper can help you discover your personal ideology

I’ve been on a bit of a writing challenge to write 1,000 words per day for 100 days (Day 13!). Mainly I write my thoughts on personal development topics—things that usually stem from real life discussions. Since starting the challenge, a couple interesting side effects have occurred from publishing my writing:

• Connected with new people on Twitter: Although I’ve never really been an active Twitter user, Twitter has been an incredible medium to connect (however briefly) with people for whom something I wrote has resonated with. It is an incredibly rewarding feeling to know that something you created was appreciated by someone other than your mother (no offense mom) and makes writing that much more fun — so much so that I have to stop myself from checking Twitter every 20 minutes in order to be productive.
• Spoke over the phone with a college senior on working life in New York: Following my “Why I’m leaving New York” piece, I received an e-mail from a student who will be starting work in New York City upon graduation. We had a great phone conversation around life after college, meeting people in New York, and not losing yourself in a city that tends to overvalue money and prestige.
• Ev Williams provided edits to my article: After publishing “How to sell your product” on the first day of the new Medium, I submitted it to be included in the ‘on startups’ collection curated by Medium founder Ev Williams. I was surprised to find a few hours later that I had two e-mail notifications that Ev Williams had added notes to my article, both suggesting edits to my piece. Definitely one of the coolest side effects of this writing challenge.

Still, however cool these things are (and I hope they continue to happen), the most useful outcome of writing on topics that are important to me is that I have come to better understand my stance on these topics.

Writing helps you clarify your personal philosophy

The best side effect of writing is that it helps you understand yourself. Writing forces you to focus on a topic (e.g. on failure, on traveling, on selling) and commit to words your personal beliefs. To be a good read, your writing needs to be logically consistent and concise, which would be simple if only our own thoughts were as well. The challenge is that our beliefs are various shades of gray, instead of black and white. We are the products of lessons from our parents and teachers, personal life experiences, and occasionally the advice of other people — so unsurprisingly what we often believe is full of contradiction and exception. Writing helps you clarify all of that.

Try this exercise sometime:

1. Take a widely-debated topic. It doesn’t have to be controversial, just polarizing — like toilet paper roll orientation (of course TP should be kept in the ‘over’ position).
2. Choose the stance you’re against and write a 100 word prompt arguing for that side (TP in the ‘under’ position is looks tidier and is a better defense against pets unraveling the roll).
3. Now, try to articulate the stance you believe in.

By the third step, you have done enough research and thinking on both sides that you’ll be able to take a strong stance on the side you’re for. In this way, writing is akin to teaching—you can’t do it well if you don’t first have a strong understanding of the content. So when you write about your thoughts, you’re organizing the jumble of opinions and forcing yourself to fill the gaps in your knowledge. For me, it is not uncommon to stop in the middle of writing, look up an article on a point I’m making, and amend my argument based on the findings.

Writing helps you solidify the lessons you’ve learned

Over drinks, I had a discussion with former roommates about blogging. One roommate lamented her recent experience with trying to start a blog: she didn’t know what to write about and felt too much pressure to write something good if it was going to be online. After posting a few times, she had abandoned the blog, saying it was too difficult to actively blog. While a couple weeks ago I might have agreed with her, the experience I’ve had over the past two weeks in consistently writing and publishing articles on Medium have shown me how impactful getting your honest thoughts out in writing can be, no matter how interesting you think your life is. If you’ve gone through challenging life experiences, chances are there are others out there who are going through similar challenges and can benefit from your wisdom. Share your failings in life so that others can learn from you. The lessons you have taken away are invaluable to those who haven’t learned it the hard way yet, and writing them down will both help you solidify the lessons you’ve learned and help others understand how to better avoid those mistakes.

Sharing your experiences can help others in similar situations not feel quite so alone. Everyone goes through tough moments in life, and in those moments knowing that someone else out there has gone through the same challenges makes a world of a difference. Next time you have difficulty deciding what to write about and feel uncertain if what you’re writing will be interesting to other people, remember this. Put your fingers to the keyboard and write about life experiences you’ve gone through and what you’ve taken away from them. You’ll have an easier time writing because it’s something you know, and chances are there’s someone out there for whom your writing will resonate strongly with. And if no one else reads it, that’s ok too — at the very least you’ll have a better understanding of yourself.

If you enjoyed this read, I’d love for you to ‘Recommend’ this piece so that others can enjoy it as well. If you’d like to distract me from working, tweet me at @andrewjiang.