Improving thought clarity through writing
“Writing is often the process by which you realize that you don’t really understand what you are talking about.”
In this essay, I go about the first principles as to why we should write down our thought process before making any important decision.
Why am I even asking this question? I am asking purely because of my memetic desire to have clarity of thought. After watching countless interviews and reading articles, I have distilled that one of the most important trait successful people have is a crystal clear mind and a good decision making process. In other words, these people have thought through the decisions that they make and are crystal clear about why they are doing it, how they’re going to execute it and how are they going to pivot if things don’t go as planned.
So how does writing play a part in this?
Writing = Understanding
Everyone knows what a zipper is, we use one almost every single day. But if I were to give you a paper and ask you to write everything you know about a zipper, can you write more than 5 sentences about it?
Writing about a topic requires you to understand a topic in detail. A prerequisite that mere awareness about a topic does not necessitate. Circling back to decision making, in order to not prematurely decide, you need to look at all permutations of the scenario and the clarity that is required for you to understand the second order effects of all the possible options.
The fact that you have an empty page that has to be filled, forces you to go down the rabbit hole and decompose the topic you have into its most fundamental constituents. For example, if you were to buy a phone, how do you decide which phone to get? Do you default to an Apple or a Samsung? Why? how important is the camera to you and why? Would you live with all the restrictions that an apple phone has just so you get the benefits of better software? Would you ignore all the hardware inefficiencies for the flexibility of the android software? How much of a battery capacity do you need? Would you sacrifice screen resolution for a better battery life?
How many of those questions did you think through?
In order to answer those questions, you’ll need to first understand how a phone works. You need to break it down to its components, understand how it all works in its separate parts and put it all back together to make a sound decision. You’ll need to know how much of the picture quality comes from the software versus the hardware. Why are some operating systems more optimized than others? Why is a phone more expensive than another? Why would you need a two day battery life as opposed to one?
The phone decision is just a trivial example. You’d think that a mistake might not be too bad. Worse comes to worst, you wait a year and make a better decision next time.
But not all decisions are as trivial. Suppose you enjoy investing in capital markets, every wrong decision you make could be disastrous. This is where thinking through the multitude of outcomes the interaction of business models, market sentiments, EBITDA, discounted cash flows and valuations as well as technical and fundamental indicators all contribute to a no-bullshit, 0-or-1, single decision to buy or sell. In this realm, understanding versus knowing will have a huge impact to how long you stay and grow in the infinite game. Unexpected things like market crashes, virus outbreaks or even short squeezes can really put you in a tough situation and only a deep understanding of markets will help you understand the beast. At the apex, a lot of domains work that way.
To understand is to see an array of pixels within a picture and to appreciate all of them or to notice the strokes of the brush on a canvas that made the entire painting come alive.
Similarly, the act of writing forces you to be present and understand the nitty gritty details that come with a decision rather than just to point out disconnected facts you know about the topic. Knowing how gets you to 5 sentences, understanding how fills up 5 pages of writing.
It is in that moment that you get clarity of how the dots are connected, you get from merely knowing to understanding — From knowledge to wisdom.
“Any fool can do it. The point is to understand why.”
― Albert Einstein
Finally, in an attempt to learn from one of the greatest strategist I know, here’s an email Jeff Bezos wrote to his employees about writing well structured, narrative text.
