쉬운 목차
I would like to walk you through my writing journey and explain how writing regularly transformed my life.
If you would like to get to the heart of this article, please feel free to skip this part and scroll down where I share with you 6 reasons why you should write regularly.
My Writing Journey
I am Korean but have lived outside of Korea for around 20 years.
I was born in the United Arab Emirates, and lived in Morocco and Spain before moving to Korea for university.
Living and adjusting to Korea was an upward battle from the very start.
First of all, my Korean was really bad. Like really really bad.
I was always behind my classmates. Every class reminded me how dumb I was—I simply could not understand what the professor was saying!
The library became my second home. I spent hours trying to read through paragraphs that would take less than 10 minutes for other kids to read.
This is when I started attending free university-sponsored Korean lessons. I was desperate to improve.
My Biggest Problem Was Not Korean…
I attended these classes religiously hoping that I would improve my Korean vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.
3 months into my classes, one day my Korean teacher abruptly stopped me.
I looked up at her and saw that her expression had a hue of worry.
Then she told me something I needed to hear but was nevertheless painful:
“Saejong, I have the feeling that the problem is not your Korean… Sure, there are areas you can improve… But what I think is the critical issue is your overall writing… Most of your arguments are not compelling enough and the evidence you present do not connect well with your thesis. Perhaps what is needed most is not Korean lessons but writing lessons…”
I was devastated. I thought my only problem was Korean. But It wasn’t. It was my writing.
The blood drained from my face. I couldn’t look the teacher in the eye. I felt humiliated.
Overcoming My Embarrassment And Where I Am Today
Luckily, I decided to double down in my writing journey.
I decided to commit. I clenched my teeth.
A voice deep inside me screamed: “I will prove you wrong!”
That day marked a new beginning for me.
It was the first day I began writing online to try and hold myself accountable.
My Korean was broken and my writing was still probably rife with logical flaws. But I kept on writing and publishing my work online.
The main channel I used was Facebook. I wanted to show the world how a guy who was so bad at Korean and writing like me could improve over time.
Most of my first posts gained no attention. The little attention I received was occasional spell checks that my friends pointed out.
But slowly but surely my writing improved. My writing began resonating with my readers and I built a following—an audience.
Not only that, I was able to build relations with people I thought were out of my league.
My writing encouraged me to build a community of like-minded, hard-working, and ambitious people.
It also opened ways to new opportunities. Just the other day I was contacted by a head-hunting firm for an Associate Partner position at McKinsey. Yesterday I chatted with a recruiter from Amazon.
I feel like I am just beginning my writing journey and looking forward to where it will take me.
In this article, I would like to share with you 6 things I gained by writing regularly and publishing my work online:
- Better Understand Your Thoughts
- Overcome Writer’s Block
- Tame Your Emotions
- Spend Less Time Writing
- Think In Layers
- Build An Audience
I truly hope you can experience the same transformation in your life!
Let’s jump right in.
1. Better Understand Your Thoughts
Have you ever faced a situation where you were sure you knew what you were thinking, but the moment somebody asked you to articulate your thoughts into words you felt stuck?
Most times we think we know what we are thinking when in reality we don’t have the faintest clue what is going on inside our head.
You can overcome this by writing.
Writing can help you visualize and nail down your abstract thoughts. It helps you categorize your thoughts into neat buckets and draw connections among them.
This is why when I feel stuck with a task, I stop thinking and start writing. I build a high-level outline and just write and follow its path.
This might seem like a waste of time. Why write about anything when you don’t have a clear picture of what you want to write about?
You would be surprised, however, that your subconscious has a compass of its own. Often as you write you discover what you want to say.
My objective while writing my first draft is to simply get everything in my head out on paper. I write, write, and write then re-read what I wrote to build order, logical connections, and content hierarchy.
This method ends up saving me a ton of time.
I usually recycle bits and pieces of my first draft and restitch it here and there to build a coherent story. What is great about making this a habit is that you will become better the more you practice.
Write and you will understand better what is in your mind and get work done faster.
2. Overcome Writer’s Block
Back in college, my biggest obstacle to writing was not the actual writing but feeling lost staring at the blank word page—the cursor blinking ominously.
“Where do I begin?” was my biggest dilemma.
Some people call this writer’s block.
However, now that I built the habit of writing consistently, I no longer have this fear. The blank page does not scare me anymore.
This is because deep down I know my writing today can never be as bad as my writing 5 years ago.
For example, this article I am writing might not be my best work. But it will never be as bad as the first article I published 5 years ago. So I have peace of mind.
Once you get used to writing, the dominant emotion that will overwhelm you when you see a blank page will not be fear—it will be excitement for what you can and will be creating.
3. Tame Your Emotions
Similar to how we don’t know what we are thinking until we can visualize our thoughts on paper, we often can’t grasp why we feel the way we do.
Writing can be an effective way to ground our emotions when it starts jumping in all directions.
Next time you feel overwhelmed by an emotion—anger, fear, worry, doubt, sadness, excitement, euphoria—sit down and write about your feeling.
This might sound silly but it is a sure way to prevent your feelings from trampling all over you. Untangle yourself from complex emotions. Objectify it and write about it.
When you write, dig deep. Deeper than you think is possible.
There is a great article I found that contains helpful questions you can ask yourself to further explore your feelings:
- Will anything change if I worry about it?
- What can I control?
- Am I safe right now?
- How have I successfully dealt with situations like this in the past?
- Who might be able to help me?
- What’s one small step I can take right now to feel better?
- What’s the best, worst, and most realistic scenario that is likely to play out?
- Where in your body do you feel anxiety?
There is also this neat TED talk delivered by Tim Ferris who explains a methodological way to master your anxieties.
With every tap of the keyboard or brush of your pen, you will be giving a shape to your feeling. From something abstract and wild you learn how to control and tame it.
Writing about your emotion will not only help you understand what is triggering these emotions but also help you find a way forward.
You can write your way out of your current state of shakey emotion into one that is more grounded and constructive.
Next time you feel lost or overwhelmed, sit down and write about it.
Try to see the emotion objectively like a wild monster to be tamed.
The more engrossed you are in writing, the easier it will be to chain down the beast and bring clearer direction on what to do about it.
4. Spend Less Time Writing
Writing helps you spend less time writing? How does that make sense?
The more you write the better you will become at writing—your output will be more logical, coherent, and with fewer mistakes which means you will spend less time having to revise your work.
What you end up doing is creating more valuable content in less time.
For example, if as a novice writer you had to re-read your work 5 times to make it legible, now as a more experienced writer, you would only need to re-read your work 2 times.
How cool is that?
Another positive byproduct of writing frequently is that your writing speed will become faster. For example, my writing speed went from 75 WPM to over 100 WPM. I still have a long way to go but my typing speed definitely improved!
So remember. The more comfortable you are writing, the faster you will be at producing high-quality output and the less time you can spend on editing.
5. Think In Layers
This is my take on ‘smart’.
‘Smart’ is knowing how to rapidly build connections among scattered information in your brain and communicating the key points in a concise manner so that the receiving end can easily understand.
Ray Dalio, CEO of Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, wrote in his book Principles that smart people are able to see information in layers.
For example, when your boss says that revenue is down by 20% this quarter, a smart person could easily contextualize the problem in different layers.
We can take a look at the layer above the immediate problem.
Revenue minus cost is profit. So it would be important to understand how the 20% decrease in revenue affects overall profitability. Maybe revenue decreased but the variable cost associated with each unit of revenue decreased even further which actually improved overall profitability. A person who can see this upper layer could look into this.
We can also see the layer below our immediate problem.
Revenue is an equation of price times quantity sold. A revenue decrease by 20% may mean one of three things: price dropped, quantity sold dropped, or both price and quantity sold dropped.
Therefore, by knowing how to think in layers, you can add context to the problem you are trying to solve and come up with a more comprehensive and well-thought-out solution.
It will also help you save time by allowing you to focus on the critical issues that matter the most.
Writing helps you see what is in your mind, organize your thoughts and easily build connections among the many variables that may affect your reasoning.
What is great about writing is that you will eventually learn how to make these connections without having to write at all—writing will help you build these connections right in your head. Isn’t that neat!
So even though you do not consider yourself smart, writing can help you gain the confidence to be smart.
For anybody who would be interested in 1on1 classes with me on mastering the art of thinking in layers, I have put together a program just for you, here.
6. Build An Audience
A piece of who we are is blended into our writing. That is what makes your writing unique and this uniqueness is what attracts people.
This idea is well explained by Packy McCormick. You can see his video here.
Packy was an investment banker in one of the most prestigious banks in the world. But he was not happy with his job.
He enjoyed writing and tried giving it a shot. What he struggled with the most was finding what to write about.
He asked himself: “what topic should I write that can make my readers online happy?”
Packy enjoyed reading and writing about IT trends, business strategy, and finance.
However, he felt that he should not choose these topics because Ben Thompson, the author of Stratechery, was dominant in this field. He already surfaced amazing insights and had a big following.
So Packy decided to write about other topics. But what he soon realized is that he was not motivated to write. He was slacking and the readers could feel it.
So after much hesitation, Packy decided to try writing about what he enjoyed. Who cares if Ben Thompson is already a big guy in this space?
His readership grew. Sluggish at first but it grew day by day. Now he has a following of more than 60,000 people! You can check out his articles, here.
The key lesson Packy learned is that even though the topic he wanted to write about is already covered by other big shots, what he had that others didn’t was his unique voice.
Packy combined in-depth market research about trends in IT and finance with a dash of his original humor to paint a unique voice his readers enjoyed.
Like Packy, writing about topics that you enjoy in your unique voice can create an audience who are willing to read what you have to say.
You can then leverage this audience for many things: you could sell paid online classes, gather beta test users for your budding startup idea, or even host a large party and have fun together.
Showing others what you write can be as revealing as a direct 1on1 conversation, if not more.
Through your writing, you can create a real bond with somebody even though you don’t know that person in the real world.
That is why publishing your writing frequently and consistently is a sure way to build an audience who is interested to know what you are doing and how you think.
The only thing you need to do is think, write, and publish. You do not have to think about building an audience because if people like what you write they will come to stay.
TLDR Summary
This week we looked into 6 reasons why you should write:
1. Better Understand your thoughts.
Writing can help you organize your thoughts and build logical connections among different ideas allowing you to make sense of what is going through your mind. When you want to know what you have to do, try writing. Roughly draw a high-level sketch of what you want to write about and just write. You will build out your game plan with every sentence you churn out. Your subconscious is more powerful than you think. Let it guide you!
2. Overcome writer’s block.
You will no longer be afraid of the ominous blinking cursor on a blank word page. The more you write, the more comfortable you will feel tackling a blank page. You will not be so concerned about the content you will produce because you know that you can edit down the road.
3. Tame Your Emotions.
Not understanding why you feel the way you do is similar to allowing a wild monster to trample all over you. Writing is an effective way to tame this monster. Next time you feel overwhelmed by an emotion, sit down somewhere quiet and write. Objectify your feelings and dig deep. Try to find why you are feeling the way you do, add context to your feeling, and build a plan on how to move forward. By doing this you will have your wild emotions tamed in no time.
4. Spend less time writing.
You will spend less time writing by writing more. This is because the more you write the better you become at writing—you will be better at churning out high-quality work in less time.
5. Become smarter.
Writing will inevitably make you smarter. Writing helps you visualize your thoughts on paper which you can then connect to produce insight. It also helps you think in layers and add context to the problem you are trying to solve. The more you write, the faster you will master how to extract the essence of your thoughts and organize them all in your head.
6. Build an Audience.
By writing consistently and publishing your work online, you can make life-long meaningful relations—an audience who will willingly read your content and become your fan. Moving forward, you can leverage this audience to build an even bigger audience, monetize it through online classes, or find business partners.
Thank you for reading this long blog post! Please let me know if there is any content that you would like to read from me for my next article. In the meantime, be happy, healthy, and safe!