Writing Is Magic

Highlights

Writing is the closest thing I know to magic. (View Highlight)

Nearly every time I need to drive a difficult, subtle, or contentious decision, I write a document. Sometimes that's half a page, sometimes its six pages. Sometimes much longer, although brevity is valuable. (View Highlight)

First, clarity. I'm sure you know the quote "Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is"1, and knowing how sloppy your thinking is allows you to sharpen it, test your arguments, and test different explanations. I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I'm thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind. (View Highlight)

Second, time. Getting people's full, focused, attention on your ideas is very hard. (View Highlight)

You get to be there, in their heads, with nothing else, for a while. You get to lay out an argument, tell a story, present some data, or ask their opinion without interruption, without back-and-forth. Just your voice. There are very few other ways to do that. (View Highlight)

Third, scale. Sometimes documents only live for an hour or so. (View Highlight)

Writing scales in time much better than speaking. I also encourage people to share documents. They can go from the initial audience, to a whole team, to other stakeholders, to people working on similar problems (View Highlight)

Fourth, authority. For some reason, people tend to believe the things I write more strongly than the things I say. (View Highlight)

I've found many times that I've said the same thing over and over and over, and then once I write it down suddenly its The Law. You need to be super careful with that effect, if you see it yourself. It can stifle discussion and communication. (View Highlight)

I don't always remember my justification for decisions I was pushing for last week. Writing is my own record. My own way to go back and see what I was thinking then, and whether its still true. (View Highlight)

Writing takes time. Writing well takes a lot of time. On the other hand, the output of writing is almost always more clarity, and sometimes a clear decision. Over my career, I think I've wasted at least ten times more time going around and around in conversations without finding consensus than I have writing documents that didn't turn out to be valuable. (View Highlight)

Lev Grossman's Magicians series has this ongoing theme about how dangerous magic is to the people to practice it, and a lot of the difficulty isn't in harnessing power, its in having that power not destroy you when you do. I think about that a lot. Influence is something worth becoming great at, and I really admire some of the people who are the best at it, but you need to be really careful. (View Highlight)