Writing
Good writing is a result of better thinking. It is so often said the writing is thinking or to write is to think.
A recent article touches on this. When I Have a Slower Publishing Cadence My Blog Grows Faster speaks to optimizing writing for publishing. The author’s thought is not optimizing from an editing perspective, but optimizing his thinking. He is making sure his thinking is clear, concise and appropriate. He continues to edit his drafts, often for months, prior to publishing. He argues that he has seen increased consumption of these articles versus articles that are shotgun published - my paraphrase.
One of the things I have been adopting in my writing and thinking activity is something I learned when studying for the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) examination for work. I used a lot of resources when studying for this certification, but one in particular was exponentially more helpful, which was (from the same site) and Luke Ahmed. The reason his teaching was more effective is because he taught me how to better think about the content than just regurgitating the content from a memorization approach. He challenges students to connect concepts from different domains and how they relate to each other, e.g., how can encryption relate to authentication? Well, passwords have a hashing function that renders them indecipherable to humans, much like encryption does.
I have taken that concept and applied it to daily writing challenges. I use Readwise to highlight and save content that I'm consuming. If you have never heard of this application, I would strongly recommend that you go check it out. For transparency, I think I get a free month or something if you sign up. I would recommend it regardless. It is one of the truly game-changing apps that I use. It collects highlights from Kindle, Reader, websites in general, podcasts, PDFs, eBooks, on and on. They also have Readwise Reader (sort of read-it-later-on-steroids) app. They have spaced repetition functionality where they serve you back a desired number of your highlights per day for better internalization of content you have consumed. I use a couple of widgets on iOS so I have two different highlight reminders on my home screen. That was a long backstory for my challenge. The challenge consists of taking those two highlights, that rotate often, and see how I can conceptually connect them together.
For example, right now, the two highlights are:
and
Defining and Adapting Your Leadership Style IdeaCast Podcast
So, in context the first is a great article about how writing improves so many things in life. Writing is helpful in learning to think better, communicate more effectively, really, it is so good at so many things, it is like magic!
The second, is in the context of improving executive presence. The creator gives a number of helpful tips and suggestions. The danger, they say, is attempting to implement a massive number of those at once. They caution to try changing in one or two areas, then iterating through other changes, as necessary.
So, the challenge becomes how do those two things fit together? My goal is typically to write 350 words on it. This one is actually pretty straight forward and easy to connect. You can see the Daily Writing Challenges.