The Benefits of Writing: Lead a Meaningful Life and Become a Master in any Field
I’ve never been a good writer, and neither am I now. But there is something about writing that draws me to it, and I enjoy the writing process. Even though I do not feel confident in writing and it takes me longer to write meaningful sentences than it really should, I still do. I still write because the benefits of it are too great to let it go.
I will try to answer why writing is one of the most important skills that open doors to new possibilities and how it can cause positively chain reactions in our life.
I believe that writing, along with reading, arithmetic, and communication skills, is the most important skill that underpins many areas of our lives.
Writing is not a meta-skill per se, but definitely, it will improve your ability to acquire more specific skills, master the meta-skills, help you solve a broad set of problems, maybe even gain peace of mind. And here’s why.
1. You become a clearer thinker and better skills-acquirer
“You can’t replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in order to think well” - Paul Graham, computer scientist, essayist, and entrepreneur
Writing has many advantages that imply the creative process itself. First of all, daily practice of thinking - about how to write and what to write about - can do wonders with our ability to abstract thinking. According to compound interest, the longer the better, but already three months of practice may bring visible results, not to mention a year. The thought process becomes much clearer.
We often write on professional topics in which we deal with complex issues. Breaking down complex topics into prime factors requires a lot of effort, and even choosing what to break down into prime factors is a complicated and tedious process. All this should be thought out and form a coherent and logical sequence in which B follows from A.
“Clear thinker is a better compliment than “smart”. Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up. Richard Feynman very famously does this in “Six Easy Pieces”, one of his early physics lectures. He basically explains mathematics in three pages. He starts from the number line — counting — and then he goes all the way up to precalculus. He just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic. He doesn’t rely on any definitions” - Naval Ravikant
You start to connect the dots, which form the bigger picture only after the appropriate number of connections. The very process of finding these dots, combining, adding, and subtracting them can be frustrating, but at the same time, we learn the iron rules of logic that are useful in all areas. These are the overarching rules that work well in any field of science, but not only that. It translates into how we perform in any domain. I will give you an example:
To give you some context: I am a great programming enthusiast, but not a great programmer. I am coding websites, but I don’t do it on a large scale, mainly for my own needs. I try to implement my graphic projects into practice.
Once, a friend asked me how to code websites and how they are built. It took me a while to reply, but I described the general operation to him. In a nutshell, I wrote back that the construction of a website is nothing more than a skeleton built from the top down of blocks and individual linear elements. I wrote for him the operation of individual elements, and also wrote a few tips, of course not as an expert. After that, I realize what websites are and how to effectively coding them. I noticed that my coding process improved
Describing the creative process itself influenced the improvement of the actual skill.
I came to this conclusion when I was working on an article about Jonathan Ive’s Principle of Design. I put a lot of effort into writing this article and thought a lot about these principles, looking at the details, and analogies of various devices and products, trying to grasp what good design means.
A few days after publishing the article, I was working on a project that was a huge challenge for me, because I had not much experience in the areas that this project was related to, but I found that knowing the basics, in this case, what is good design is far more important than knowing advances techniques, because the principles of good design are applicable regardless of the field. Basics rules are foundations.
I thought that the only way to become better at something is to practice it. Of course, practice does wonders, but I've also found that when you describe the principles, you begin to understand them better, which translates into the skill itself.
2. Peace of mind - writing as a spiritual practice
The writing process requires us to be fully committed and focused, which has a positive effect on our nerve cells and can even be therapeutic. When we are absorbed by tapping on the keyboard or pouring ink on paper, we forget about everyday problems, we kind of lose ourselves in the writing process.
Those therapeutic aspects of writing are often brought up by people who use to do daily journaling. I also found a similar conclusion in ancient Greek philosophy, particularly among stoic philosophers. This habit of introspective writing down our everyday life seems to perform miracles for some, it gives them a clear mind.
“I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by” - Seneca
In this quote, Seneca referred to his daily habit of journaling, a practice to maintain an appropriate state of mind. The Stoics were well known for practicing habits that served them to maintain proper mental health, and they practiced many spiritual exercises.
We are from an early age taught to write well at school, focusing on unchanging rules, while writing is about forming thoughts in motion. That’s why writing is still associated with boring school exercises, while this skill has a therapeutic nature because every time you try to catch your thought, you gain mental clarity.
3. Writing is a bottomless pit of ideas.
“All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.” - Robert Frost, American poet, Four-time Pulitzer Prize winner
Each sentence or thought brings conclusions that can be interpreted differently. It’s like a domino effect - one piece has consequences for all the rest. Writing is chasing untouchables. You’re trying to capture the solid essence of your thoughts that are constantly running on your mind.
You can always formulate something differently. You can change one word and that will make the whole sentence change its meaning. Writing is like balancing on the edge. Bad move - poorly chosen words and a whole sentence can lose its meaning. Failing.
You become a builder who places bricks in a space that logically and naturally creates a new quality - a brick house. You don’t have to rely on any predetermined rules, you can create the whole thing with your thoughts from scratch. You have free will to formulate your sentences, it means that you can build a better piece than someone who embraces a full stack of rules.
In a world full of unknown dots, combining them makes us create previously unknown shapes. Building new structures that make us understand more on the one hand, and on the other, it opens new doors full of unknown dots. We become more open to the world and creative, or as simply James Altucher, famous author and entrepreneur said - we become “Idea Machine”.
4. You gain different perspectives.
Writing that influences or moves the reader in some way resonate with the recipient on the same wavelength. It understands his problems, emotions, faults, or the current situation, and to get the same waves, we need to look beyond our narrow horizon and broaden our perspective.
This principle applies not only to complex psychological novels about the nature of people but also to simple tutorials on the internet. To write a tutorial right, you need to understand the reader's perspective and see from it. You have to know what he cares about, what are the potential shortcomings of beginners, how to get interested in a given topic. And most importantly, how to write intelligibly.
Writing has a positive effect on our empathy, you make mental wrestling with your thoughts, you know your struggles and weak points. You become vulnerable with nothing to defend - naked to your thoughts. You begin to understand that others are struggling with their day-to-day problems in the same way.
It changes our perception of the world, we begin to understand how multi-layered it is, which has many positive effects. By gaining new perspectives we grow on every level of our life, from professional to private.
Summary:
Writing has a positive effect on our thought process, we become clearer thinkers and we better understand the rules of any field.
For many years, writing has served as a spiritualistic practice that helps ease the stress of everyday life.
Writing brings out the last layers of creativity from us, we become "Idea Machine".
Writing gives you new perspectives and makes you grow as a person.
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