Why the best way to improve your thinking is to write daily and long-form

TLDR:

Yesterday evening, I came across David Perell’s tweet on how by writing regularly, you train yourself to tweet better.

Today, while driving to the orthodontist for an appointment, I listened to this week’s episode of David’s “How I Write” podcast with Byrne Hobart, who says there is a correlation between the article's length and how well it does.

He says that it stems from the fact that the more you write about something, “the more likely it is that you have done the definitive take,” for “when people want to explain the topic to someone else thoroughly, that’s [your article] is what they cite.”

This got me thinking that aside from conducting all the necessary, high-quality research to stamp such a level of authority, what other means could there be to reach that level?

I redirected myself to David’s tweet, however not to write regularly, but daily. A byproduct of that (at least for me) is that it also trains you to think better, and I didn’t realize that until coming across David preaching it on Twitter.

One can also think of this as a correlation between how the clearer you think, the higher your level of authority is on the subject, for there’s a reason why Sam Parr says that to be a great writer, you have to think clearly.

Because that’s what great writers are: authorities on the subject that people deem as highly credible.

But how will writing daily and long-form content get you to think better?

In my view, the best medium of daily writing is journaling towards the end of the day.

Rather than just reflecting on certain events that have just recently transpired in your life now and then, find yourself pondering over what thoughts have crossed your mind in the waking hours daily, looking to answer them with every piece of information you’ve assimilated that has led you to think about it.

Every time you reach an answer you’re content with, you’ve subconsciously reframed your mind just a bit, as by reaching a definitive answer, you’re recalibrating your filters of the information to keep in and the ones to flush out of your system for good.

If you’re still curious, all the merrier, for you’ll find yourself taking initiatives you thought you’d never be taking to satiate your curiosity, such as reading long-form articles, research papers, and books. I certainly never pictured myself doing any of the aforementioned at the start of this decade, and that too for such a rationale.

By doing so, you’ll be exponentially speeding up the process of how you process every individual experience you have in life as a result of the lengths you go to answer the questions that stay put in your mind throughout the day, and you probably won’t even realize it. Classic spillover effect at its best.

But of course, this isn’t solely applicable to daily journaling.

You can embark on a 100-day challenge to write every day like we’re currently reaching the climax of and learn how to differentiate the gold from the truckloads of crap throughout the journey or in hindsight when you look back and see what learnings to take away from that experience.

Just don’t forget that it’s better to do it badly than not at all, as that’s where a lot of the learning happens, along with when you find the willpower to keep the fire lit on the most mentally arduous of days. It’s all about intrinsic motivation.

So what about long-form?

From my experiences of writing long-form content, it’s akin to going deep into the creativity stream Vinh Giang talks about in “The Creative Act” episode of the Vinh & Ali show.

The deeper you are, the more curious you are, the more thorough the research you conduct, and the more willing you are to err and learn throughout the process of writing the piece in hopes of writing the best possible version of what it is you have in mind, and most importantly, the deeper your understanding becomes of the subject to come out of the stream as a whole new person, one with a high degree of authority on the topic you’re writing on.

Because you do come out as a new person after you hit the publish button for that piece.

As you’re clicking the keypad or mouse to publish, what you’re showcasing to the world is the learning curve you’ve had from this experience, composed of the “woah” you said to yourself as you assimilated certain information not just relevant to this particular article, but ones that can be applied across several domains, how your thinking and opinions were molded from the research you conducted that may also be applicable anywhere else going forward, and the learnings you took away yourself from writing the article.

All of this is compounded towards recalibrating those filters to think better, and to become more deliberate with what it is you think about resulting from how you’ve trained your filters, essentially an extension of the James-Lange theory which proposes that emotion is the result of arousal; the principle applies here in this case as well.

However, such exigence can only stem from an organic interest in the topic you’re writing on, so ensure that the condition is met.

Otherwise, it’s pointless.

By undergoing such exercises and developing your deliberation, you may end up with a better understanding of why the writer of an article you read was in a position to write it than the writer as Hobart talks about, transcending to the next level.

This article ended up being way longer than I anticipated, so perhaps if you’re already well-versed in coherent thinking, you’re in a superior position to understand why I wrote this in the first place, let alone how its length became longer than intended.

The way I see it, it’s a combination of three things: the fact that I love to write, I have some sense of familiarity in both daily and long-form writing so I see myself as an authority to write on the subject, and because it felt good to hear Hobart say how there’s a correlation between length and how well it does.

So perhaps the odds of you reading this are now higher than what it may have been originally. To condense it all and answer the question why the best way to improve your thinking is to write daily and long-form, two words come to mind: filters and intrinsic motivation.