Writing your ideas down forces your brain to discover what you really think
It’s hard because it works.
By Danny Kenny
In an environmental ethics class, I had to write a short essay, 800 to maybe 1,000 words, every week. You had to lay out an argument for “why I think eating meat is unacceptable,” or “GMOs are okay, actually.” There was no right answer; what mattered was the quality of your argument.
Professor Simeone, who checked a few boxes for crazy, brilliant academics, was a hard grader. If you had lazy arguments or didn’t seriously consider the counterarguments to your position, you were greeted with an enormous amount of red ink on your draft.
For someone obsessed with grades and maintaining a 4.0, I still remember the B- I got on an essay arguing in favor of eating meat. In the comments, Simeone argued, correctly, that I hadn’t seriously wrestled with the worthwhile counters to my argument. I had been lazy.
Fortunately, he also offered rewrites for half the remaining points, and I forced myself to consider that maybe I was not as right as I first thought. With each essay, I softened from my original position as I realized what I didn’t know, where someone had a legitimate case against me, and where I was frankly wrong. The process made me a better thinker.
It’s been years since I took that class. When I talked with my old boss, Stan McChrystal, he told me he’d found the same thing writing On Character decades into a career that included commanding U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. “When I had to write a 1,000-word essay,” he said, “I found, in many cases, my beliefs were different from what I originally thought.” He is one of the most accomplished leaders I’ve ever encountered: introspective, a frequent writer, and still learning something new whenever he forces his thoughts onto the page.
Writing can be tedious. It can be tiresome to sit down with pen and paper. Your hand cramps. The pen bleeds ink. Or you start typing and notice your posture is truly and utterly poor. My grandmother would be horrified.
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Orwell likened writing a book to a “long bout of some painful illness.” As Rose Horowitch put it in The Atlantic, writing “is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard.” It instead “exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights.”
But the hard part of anything does something good for your brain. I saw it up close as a Spanish tutor. Someone was trying to recall the word for soldier, soldado. They couldn’t get it, and I wouldn’t give it to them. I asked them to think about what they were doing when they first learned the word. It probably took five minutes of this word being on the tip of their tongue, which is excruciating. There is a fine line between being a teacher and being an asshole.
And then, suddenly, they remembered. We danced around this little study room like we’d won the World Cup. Disruptive to the other students. Utterly delightful to celebrate. And I’m willing to bet all of my money they’ve never forgotten the Spanish word for soldier.
When your brain works hard at something, it remembers it. It pays attention. It deepens the groove, strengthens the connections between neurons. It’s how you grow. That’s what writing does.
Good writing forces logic. To write clearly for you, the reader, I have to be clear to myself first. Do I have a good thought process? Is there good logic? What counterarguments can people make against my points? Have I thought through my counters to those counters?
I often write about topics under the larger umbrella of wisdom, in the hopes of helping people live lives aligned with meaning and purpose. Well, what is wisdom? The psychologists Paul Baltes and Ursula Staudinger called it “an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life.” Monika Ardelt read that and said, essentially, no. Wisdom “should not be reduced to expertise.” It’s “an integration of cognitive, reflective, and affective personality characteristics.” One camp says wisdom is something you know. The other says it’s someone you are.
So, Dilip Jeste and colleagues asked a panel of wisdom experts to settle it. Among their conclusions: “[C]onsistent definitions of wisdom remain elusive.” (Thanks for that.)
My own working definition, from scribblings back in August, argues that wisdom is the craft of living well — a skill and expertise in dealing with the fundamental, uncertain, value-laden (inevitable) problems of life — which, I realized while writing this, means that wisdom can be learned. Possibly true. Certainly a position to test. And ultimately a realization that I still don’t totally know how to define wisdom. Maybe those experts were on to something.
With topics like wisdom or leadership, how you think about them dictates where you aim. My consistent efforts to write about it, as poorly formed as they may be, keep refining and sharpening my point of view and the logic and evidence supporting it. This matters for the writing I produce, but it also matters when I’m standing in front of a CEO asking me whether they are a good or bad leader capable of wise decisions. To have a good answer for them, I first have to have a good answer for myself. Writing is one of the most important ways to discover what it is you think.
Start with a win, a challenge, and a lesson
Write more often. Journal in some shape or form. Eat your word vegetables. You don’t need a perfect leather-bound book, the smell of rich mahogany, or the zen of Malte Marten handpan music to find five minutes to put words on a page.
My lightest-weight journaling practice is three lines a day: today’s win, challenge, and lesson learned. One day of it isn’t much, but a few months of this practice records how your thinking might evolve. In June, I wrote: “Wisdom is action. Wisdom is service. Wisdom is embodied. Wisdom is care. Wisdom is performance.” Five different answers, all borderline insufferable. Fast forward to August, and the challenge I recorded was “Writing for the Wisdom Book this morning was hard because I didn’t know what to do, so I opted for reading instead.” The next day, my lesson learned, “This feels close to the working definition of wisdom,” led to the definition I quoted above, which feels more true to me. This month, I’m down to four words: “Wisdom is a craft.”
Am I right? I have no idea. But I understand my thinking better, and my thoughts on wisdom are better justified and more explainable than they once were.
Practice this for a week — five minutes: one win, one challenge, one lesson learned — and then read it back. What do you notice from seven wins, seven challenges, and seven lessons learned?
If you want two whole gold stars, pick a topic you think you know fairly well. How does a TV work? Why is your character good? What’s your position on AI? Write it out as if you were teaching someone else. People call this the Feynman technique, after the physicist Richard Feynman. You will be amazed how fast your knowledge gaps show up, and how often you can’t say where a belief came from.
You might be sure about something right now. Write 1,000 words on it and see if you still are. Some of it might survive the red ink. You’d want to know which parts.
Want to go deeper on sharpening how you think? Check out this Big Think Class featuring the late Daniel C. Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist.
Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. Teams that ask for help out loud don't happen by accident and if you want help building them, you can reach Danny at dkenny.net.
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This is so profoundly true (& underrated) at every stage of life.
I wrote a whole novel by hand. It was marvelous.