Four Reasons Why I Write
I've been writing online for six months. Ever since I started, people have kept asking the question "Why are you doing it?"
For six months, I've struggled to have a good answer.
There have been times since I started that writing felt like a chore. Whenever I forced myself to publish by a certain deadline or write about a certain topic, this would happen.
When thinking about what I wanted my reasons to be, I eliminated any reason that made writing feel like a chore. This left me with four reasons which make me thrilled to write.
My reasons will be different than yours and everyone else's, as they should be. But the worst place to be is in the messy middle, writing something for the wrong reasons.
Four reasons I write
There are hundreds of reasons to write online, but I settled on four reasons for why I do it.
- Have a creative outlet for my personal experience
- Create a curiosity flywheel
- Hone my ability to express ideas
- Be a lighthouse for like-minded people
1. Have a creative outlet for my personal experience
When I started writing online, I read about the importance of defining your "personal monopoly" - the unique combination of topics and ideas you know better than anyone else.
With a personal monopoly defined, you can target your writing to a niche audience that appreciates your unique combination of topics.
There are two ways to define your personal monopoly - explicitly and implicitly. Your explicit personal monopoly is how you publicly define your unique combination of interests. Your implicit personal monopoly is your unique history of experience, experiments, and mistakes.
For example, consider an ER nurse who is into mindfulness, meditation, and fitness. They would start writing about these topics in a way that appeals to ER nurses, with the goal of targeting that niche audience. Their explicit personal monopoly is "Mindfulness and Fitness for ER nurses." Their implicit personal monopoly is their experience of applying mindfulness and fitness in their own life as an ER nurse.
To me, defining an explicit personal monopoly is limiting. I don't want to tune my writing to target a niche. I prefer to have an implicit personal monopoly, writing about my personal experience and whatever is interesting to me at the time.
I want my writing habit to be self-indulgent. By constraining myself to targeting a niche, I begin to write with someone else in mind, writing only things I think I should be writing. And when I'm not writing for myself, every word is a struggle.
But when writing to reflect on my personal experience or to share a personal perspective, the words burst onto the page.
2. Create a curiosity flywheel
I set a goal in 2020 to be more curious.
With any new habit, I knew I needed to create a flywheel if I wanted it to stick. In a flywheel, every step reinforces the next step and every spin is faster than the one before.
I started by asking "what does being more curious look like?" My answer was being curious looks like exploring more ideas and asking more questions. From there I asked, "what habit forces me to explore more ideas?"
The answer to that was writing online.
The five steps of my curiosity flywheel for exploring ideas are:
- Converse - I talk to other people to work through and discover new ideas.
- Curate - I gather resources and content recommended from others and from my own research.
- Consume - I consume content related to these ideas to better understand them.
- Clarify - I clarify the ideas in my head, synthesizing the information from each resources
- Create - I create something to do with those ideas - a blog post, tweet, or operating principle.
From there, the content I create leads to more conversations, which leads to more curation, more consumption, and on and on and on.
3. Hone my ability to express ideas
I spend 12 hours a day predicting global economies, analyzing charts, and crunching numbers. And I love every second of it.
But, I follow a simple principle for what I spend my time on:
Spend 20% of your time working on something unrelated but complementary to how you spend the other 80%
Writing online fits that criteria.
The ability to clearly express ideas is a multiplier no matter the industry you work in.
Think of the most prolific people in any industry. They've combined their expertise in the field with an ability to craft a narrative, tell or a story, or explain an idea. It's no coincidence that some of the best investors and leaders, be it Warren Buffet, Howard Marks, or Jeff Bezos, have magnified their impact through their ability to write.
4. Be a lighthouse for like-minded people
The internet has democratized friendship.
Before the internet, your friends could only be those you went to school with or that lived on your street. If they weren't interested in the same things as you, you were out of luck.
The internet has changed this. It unlocks access to hundreds or thousands of people who see the world the same way you do. But they need a way to find you.
The best way to do that is to be easy to find. The perfect metaphor for this is a lighthouse. Lighthouses can be seen from miles away, in any direction, at any time, day or night.
Anyone who stumbles across my Twitter, newsletter, or blog at any time and from any place can see the way I see the world. If it’s similar to how they do, it gives them an easy jumping-off point to strike up a conversation.
Since I've started writing, I've met at least 20 people who like the same ideas, draw inspiration from the same places, and see the world through a similar lens. All because I made it easier to find me.
Conclusion
As I finish writing this, I'm realizing this essay nicely covers each of the four reasons I want to write, which is why it's been such a pleasure to put together.
Very meta, and very much not a chore.