For the first post of this blog, what better topic than attempting to crystalize my motivation for writing. Hopefully, this post will serve as documentation of my motivation at this point in time which may may provide inspiration when that motivation is gone, or valuable insight when motivations change.

Writing to Think

Recently, I stumbled upon this quote:

If you’re thinking, but not writing, you only think that you’re thinking.

—Leslie Lamport, author of LaTeX

When reflecing on the quote, I recall many situations where this rings true. The most obvious examples to me are when asking for help on some problem I’m attmpting to sovle, say smashing some esoteric bug. The process goes something like:

  1. Attempt to solve it in isolation, decide it’s time to ask for input,
  2. Write a description of the problem,
  3. Provide the solutions I have attmpted, what worked and what didn’t,
  4. Send message

But! More often than not, during step 2. or 3., I realize the problem formulation is flawed, or my solution is missing some aspect. I end up deleting my message draft and go on to solve the problem.

Forcing Thoughts to Take Shape

The obvious take-away from this example is that when writing we are forced to shape our thoughts and make them concrete. If this works well for debugging and feature development, why not utilize this tool for other aspects of life than text-based rubber-ducking?

I think, today’s ever-incrasing content consumption has made it more difficult to hold on to one thought, process and yield some insight and knowledge from it. It is true for me at least. Therefore, honing the skill of processing thoughts through text will only become more important.

Other Incentives

There are of course many other advantages to writing, these are secondary to me but still worth mentioning:

  • Improve my writing ability
  • Building an online brand
  • Learn/practice new tooling (Hugo, Emacs, Netlify, etc.)