Writing, the Doing of Thinking

I've been wondering, with much earnestness, what my reaction is to the massive societal shift that everyone doing knowledge work, and certainly everyone who's building software, is experiencing - ...how lucky we are to be alive right now 🎶 f*ck f*ck.

I've not arrived at the answer yet, because it's not just one question and it's not just one answer. But one conclusion I've come to is that this shift makes me want to think more. With so much more leverage, every decision gets amplified, so I want to act thoughtfully, and one of the best ways I know to sharpen my thinking is to write it down, reflect on it and refine it.

Both within the companies I've worked for and the communities I've been a part of, I've long favored doing and building over spending a lot of time just talking or thinking about what could be done. Doing has always been the hardest part - actually executing against an idea - so that's where I've sought out my challenges. But with so much of the doing now being taken out of our hands, I see the hard part moving from the doing to the thinking.

Now, what's great about doing, and why I've always focused on it, is the confrontation with reality. When you're just playing around with ideas, nothing pushes back on you in unexpected ways. But once you actually try to form software into a particular shape or hand someone a product, that's when you really see what works.

Writing, in turn, pushes back on thinking. It has an unyielding propensity to point out the flaws in my reasoning. A stream of consciousness can feel well-formed and logical. But our brains like to fill gaps and make connections based on our priors and experience, without that glue actually being available to us once we try to explain it. When I put things on the page, I'm forced to close those gaps and spell out those connections. I also give myself the space to sit with them and figure out which of the versions in my head is actually the one I believe. Writing is the doing of thinking.

So I'll be writing more, thinking more and sharing more here.