Why I Want to Write

Once again, I’m sitting down to start a new writing habit.

I’ve tried this a few times before.

In 2020, during the height of COVID lockdowns, I bought my own URL and started writing. I made it through five published posts before the world re-opened and I was distracted by the return to in-person activities.

I tried again this past January as a New Years Resolution. I opened a word doc and committed to journaling something in it for 30 straight days. I hit that goal but faded after Day 73 as preparations for our new baby ramped up.

Now, yet again, I’m hoping to start and have it stick.

Why do I insist on coming back to writing?

Writing is Thinking

Writing forces clarity and specifics. The process of writing helps to clean the thoughts in your head. Our thoughts feel fully reasoned, but the actual act of putting pen (finger) to paper (keyboard) brings out how messy those thoughts in our head are.

Morgan Housel spells it out more eloquently in his piece Why Everyone Should Write :

“Writing crystallizes ideas in ways thinking on its own will never accomplish.”

Writing forces you to get out of your own head. Our internal dialogue has miscellaneous thoughts floating around that a reader can’t access. Writing makes you focus on the information that’s actually important and organize it in a coherent way.

We often think we have a clear thought and don’t realize how messy it is until we write it down.

Jeff Bezos famously required executives to start meetings with written six-pager memos.

“When you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure, it's hard to hide sloppy thinking. It forces the author to be at their best. You're getting their best thinking.”

Surface Area for Luck

I believe that writing online will increase the surface area for luck in my life.

We don’t typically appreciate:

1. The degree to which luck influences our lives

2. You can help luck help you

I’ve seen a dozen stories play out that are some variation of:

1. Person showcases something creative online

2. It reaches someone outside their immediate network

3. An opportunity comes from that new connection

The key is that #3 only happens but for #1. It’s an opportunity that wouldn’t happen otherwise.

That begs the natural question – what opportunities am I looking for?

I don’t know. The outcomes are unpredictable. That’s what makes this a reason I’m interested in writing; by sharing what I’m learning, thinking, and exploring, I hope to open the doors to people, ideas, and opportunities that I couldn’t have planned for otherwise.

We can’t predict which connections will matter or what paths they’ll open. And because of that uncertainty, there’s real value in simply putting things out into the world and opening ourselves up to the possibility of letting the unpredictable happen (e.g. getting lucky).

Exploring Intersecting Interests

This won’t be a blog focused on one specific topic. I want to use it as an opportunity to explore different fields, share what I’m learning and working on, and solidify my knowledge and opinions. The only commonality is that it’s interesting to me at the time.

I want to follow my intellectual curiosities and see where they take me. I’m interested in topics across tech, politics, startups, real estate, sports, media, finance, psychology, and societal trends.

I’m a firm believer that the most valuable insights come from drawing connections across disciplines. The world doesn’t work in silos, and often there’s similarities and inspiration found by cross-pollinating ideas from different realms.

The books in my office are filled with notes scribbled in the margins with references to ideas from books in other fields. Writing will be a way for me to expand on those notes and explore my curiosities.

Regret Minimization

Something inside me keeps bringing me back to this. I regret not having kept up prior attempts. I can’t help but think about how much better I’d be if I’d published regularly since my first post in 2020.

It feels important that a voice in my head keeps saying “you should do this” combined with the regret over having NOT done it in the past.

I’m taking it as a signal that this is something that is important to me, even if I can’t fully describe why.

Thus, I’m going to commit to writing regularly for peace of mind, so that in five years I don’t look back and once again regret not writing regularly.

This is basically a Regret Minimization decision. Jeff Bezos popularized this as a framework for decision making. In a 1999 interview with 60 Minutes, he explained how he decided to leave his highly paid Wall Street job to trek across the country and start Amazon:

“When I'm 80… I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have. I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this… but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.”

(The video clip of a much younger and much nerdier Bezos is awesome)

I’d rather make the mistake of trying and realizing it’s not for me than keep making the mistake of not trying at all. To paraphrase Coach John Wooden, I’m looking for the self-satisfaction that I’ve given writing my best effort, regardless of how it turns out.

---

I’d love if you wanted to follow me on the journey by subscribing to this Substack. I’m not quite sure how often I’ll post, what I’ll write about, or how long they’ll be.

If you agree/disagree with anything that I write I’d love to hear from you! Part of this exercise is to sharpen my thinking and my writing, and I welcome any feedback on the writing or further discussion of the content.

Thanks for reading. I’m excited to see where this newfound hobby leads.

---

A few related blog posts that inspired me to get started:

• The Great Online Game

• Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now

• How to Start a Blog that Changes Your Life

• Why and How to Write Things on the Internet