I love writing. It gives me enormous pleasure to create something from scratch. I love coming up with clever phrases and sentences so much that I’ve developed entire perspectives to support a particular phrase or sentence I found fascinating. I don’t always subscribe to these but the perspectives are new and that alone is worth something.
Sometimes it is the other way around. It takes me a lot of effort before I can put together just the right sequence of words needed to express something. These bring me a sense of accomplishment. I also enjoy writing down streams of consciousness and am pleasantly surprised when one holds up to repeated critical readings.
Naturally, one would assume I spend a lot of time writing. I don’t. I do jot down interesting ideas and observations in the various notebooks(digital and physical) that I keep, but none of these notes have ever shaped up into anything that is fully threshed out, or remotely complete. Eventually everything good petered out because it was not intended for an audience. Not having someone at the other end of what is essentially communication, subtly demotivates me.
A couple of decades ago I used to maintain a blog. I wrote a lot and I wrote whatever I felt like – short stories, essays, opinions, clever statements and random streams of consciousness. At first the writing was just ok but with engagement and feedback my ideas got better. They got better because I was writing publicly; knowing that something would be read, elicit a reaction and perhaps be judged, just made me try harder.
That put a lot of pressure on me resulting in an undesirable effect. Instead of writing to reason, I was writing to pander. Like most people, I often have opinions and ideas that conflict with my professional life, public persona and frequently expressed beliefs. I started avoiding such conflicts or editing them out. Predictably, I stopped enjoying writing. A short while later, I just stopped writing. I was quite young at the time and craved validation more than I do today. Perhaps if I had stuck with it, I would’ve figured out a good balance, to write with integrity. I intend to find out. This site is my attempt to write publicly.
Before I begin I’d like to set some objectives for myself. I’ll write them in simple present tense; it’s just more effective with goals.
My Writing Objectives
- I write to reason. A lot of opinions and ideas sound great in my head initially. It however takes structured thinking to separate the wheat from the chaff. Writing provides me with this structure.
- I write to understand complex concepts and ideas. Explaining them in my own words helps me identify gaps in my understanding.
- I write to discover. Research and rewrites are an essential part of good writing, and inevitable paths to discovering new information and perspective.
- I write to solve. The best solutions to anything are rarely apparent. Most of your ideas while writing are a result of the process, so it just makes sense to use this as a tool to identify solutions to problems.
- I write to communicate. Crafting a message that communicates clearly, takes effort. Making one that will spread is even harder. I intend to learn how to do both better, by simply attempting to do more of it.
- I write to correct. All thinking, media consumption, reading and conversation is a process of creating mental models of the world around us. Errors and biases creep into these models even for the best of us. I hope that by explicitly articulating things that matter to me, I will be able to correct such errors.
- I write to complete. Every thought lives on a continuum. It is generated by other thoughts and triggers more. Naturally, at both ends, it is beset by distractions. Completing a thought requires you to cut out everything that is irrelevant while following where it leads. This is what I intend to do.
I don’t intend to let the idea of perfection in pursuing these objectives derail me. I only aim to be goodish at each of them. The title of this site is merely a reminder to myself.
Most importantly, I hope to enjoy myself.