How to get smarter (good ideas don’t happen by accident)

I first started keeping a journal in my second year of college. I wrote 15 minutes a day about whatever I wanted. Classes, roommates, parties. It was fun. Not having an agenda helped me build the habit. 

When I graduated, I reread some of my first entries, and only then did I realize how much my writing had improved. It wasn’t just my penmanship of those initial months that appeared crude, but the very structure of my thoughts. My early ideas were superficial and rigid. Writing made them sharper and me smarter.

Writing offers a special kind of concrete thinking that, as far as I know, has no substitute. It took publishing several hundred blogs for me to realize writing is not so much the recording of ideas, but the discovery of them. 

New thinking

When a painter takes a brush to canvas, usually what comes out is different from what they had in mind. If it doesn’t look quite right, they paint over it and try again. Every time they discover what it isn’t, they get closer to figuring out what it is.

Just the same, when I sit down to write, I have an idea of how a story might unfold. Most of the time I’m wrong, and I never recognize how wrong I am until I stumble forward in the dark long enough to find a light switch. 

Rarely do good ideas come from a stroke of genius. They are born from iteration and showing your work. It’s about filtering out all the things something isn’t, then refining what’s left. This is difficult to do in your head. 

I rewrote this essay, for example, a dozen times over the last two weeks. This version looks nothing like my first draft. I had initially wanted to explore productive study techniques, but that evolved into what you’re reading now, which has nothing to do with what I had in mind.

Blind spots

When I lived in Hong Kong, I visited a new country almost every month and considered myself a seasoned traveler. Yet I learned a great deal more about travel when I wrote a book about it.

Much of the insights were already in my head, but I didn’t realize I knew them until I had to explain them.

In any case, knowing what to say is hard. Selecting the precise words to say it is even harder. A safe assumption is that the words you pick first are wrong. Journalists and authors struggle with this as much as anyone. The books and articles you admire all went through many, many rounds of painful rewrites.

Still, experienced writers understand that the point of writing is not to show off your expertise, but to figure out how little you actually know. Even bad writing is aspirational because it’s an attempt at coherence and understanding. Putting thoughts into words changes your original ideas because it specifies them.

It’s only once you’ve written something down that you can dissect an idea word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph. Each of these levels of resolution offer a strict test. If they make it through these filters, they are subjected to a final test — whether the piece or essay as a whole makes sense.

It’s possible your words, sentences, and paragraphs are all individually correct, but together don’t say anything meaningful.

With some luck, you can repeat this undertaking and discard all the crap until you’re left with something lucid and concise. Only the best ideas survive this process.

The case for writing

While it’s possible to sort through certain ideas without writing, you run into limitations quickly. I would have a hard time believing someone who said they have an informed, thoughtful take on something serious that they have never written about.

Even the brightest mathematicians can’t go far with mental math; they aren’t meditating over lengthy proofs without pen and paper.

You could make the case that speaking can generate and clarify ideas, though I still believe writing is the higher, more exacting bar. Think about your last conversation. If you were to read the transcript, you’d see imprecise, unwieldy language. Writing is speaking, but with heavy editing.

This brings us to an uncontroversial premise: Writing makes ideas more concrete, complete, and specific.

If you agree with that statement, that suggests you’d also agree that not writing means your ideas are vague, incomplete, and shapeless. 

This line of thinking then leads us to the next premise, which is more startling: Someone who has not written about a certain topic can’t have any fully-developed ideas about it.

Some beliefs may feel robust and obvious, but without exploring them on paper it’s hard to know for sure. Lived experiences, for instance, can impart lessons implicitly. But without writing it’s hard to make sense of them. Writing is how you scrutinize what you think you know.

There is a troubling conclusion to this argument: A person who never writes at all may not have clarity on anything beyond what they can figure out in their head.

Leverage and value

It is true that writing more makes you a better writer, but the skill is less important than the act. If a demon cast a spell on me and told me I could no longer improve as a writer no matter what, I would still write everyday. 

The more you write, the stronger your ability to think and communicate. Writing makes you more impactful and competent at whatever you choose to pursue. It trains you to discern good and bad ideas, which arms you against fads and scams.

An articulate mind, meanwhile, is one that can persuade, sell and invent — three attributes that can give you enormous leverage in life and business.

Writing won’t guarantee ideas become true or accurate, but it’s the most reasonable step forward if you hope to get them there. At the least, it’s a process you can use to be wrong less often.

You might think it’s self-serving for a writer to be both a proponent of his trade and a harbinger against the dangers of not writing. Maybe so. In truth I don’t see this as an argument for writing. I see it as a free and clear path forward for anyone who wants to get smarter.

But don’t take me at my word. Go grab a pen. 

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