Writing involves not just the act of writing but the researching, the reading, and the thinking done beforehand. In fact, the physical act of creating the first draft (which is what most people think of as “writing”) is the easiest part of that process.
If we don’t write something down, we are, in effect, either claiming that our brain will remember it, which is foolish and short-sighted, or making a decision that the information isn’t worth remembering.
Writing things down is one of the things that differentiates us from mere animals. Many animals display complex problem-solving skills and a memory of previous solutions. However, only we are capable of truly learning by making leaps of insight regarding those solutions. Only we can apply the core of those solutions to other, seemingly unrelated, problems.
Writing is the reason that the Zettelkasten method works so well.
It is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked (anschlußfähig) fashion.
Really, this note doesn’t just apply to writing— it applies to Content Creation as well. Creating content helps us learn as well.
References
See also
- Developing a system to capture and process your ideas is essential to learning from them
- Restate an idea in your own words to truly learn it.
- Get your first shitty draft over as fast as possible.
- Creating that first draft extends your learning so that you’re fundamentally a different person from the person who hadn’t yet started writing the draft.
- Slow Burn vs Heavy Lift: Gradually collecting ideas over time and then tying them together is easier than starting from nothing.
- The ideas (permanent notes) we collect over time in written form do not represent our learning; they are our learning, in a very real way.
- Building a Second Brain allows you to outsource storage, freeing your brain up to make ideas instead of remembering them.
- This is why having a Second Brain is so important: it allows us to learn more (i.e., store) more than we would have been able to on our first brain. Writing is the tangible medium by which we outsource our learning.
- Milani, P. (2022). Thinking vs writing. Retrieved from Mastodon Posts from daviddelven.↩︎