I got inspired to write because I grew up reading Paul Graham’s essays. They’re very simple [1] in language, yet very deep in content and thoughts. What seemed to be exclusive to a certain class of people with advanced grammar vocabulary, suddenly started to look irrelevant and almost like random portraits of arts that only 0.1% of humanity cares about.

PGs essays are almost like Wikipedia but for startups, whenever I think about something related to startups I always find an essay that he’s written to address it.

Over time I started realizing that I always have long-form debates in my head when thinking and that if I convert that thought energy into words then it would really help me think straighter.

When I started writing online, I thought that I’m writing for other people to read. I was wrong. I don’t think people should write for others, instead, people should write for themselves. When you write for yourself, you put in all your focus and energy to debug whatever thought you have, and in the process of doing that, you end up expressing thoughts in very simple terms that you yourself would use when thinking.

Writing is like exercise for the brain, am not sure if there’s any research evidence for this, but as I started writing longer essays I noticed that I started to see my independent thinking improve and I began to have more original thoughts.

So why should engineers write? Well, engineering is all about bringing ideas to life, and writing was the first form of communication humans invented about 5,000 years ago to bring ideas to life.

When engineers write, it challenges them to express complex abstractions in simple compressed words, and I think this skill set is very important to learn for pitching ideas to investors and explaining products to non-technical people which is valuable for engineers.



Notes

[1]: Write like you talk: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html