Publish to learn
"If you think you know something but don't write it down, you only think you know it." — Leslie Lamport
Many other smart folks such as William Zinsser, Paul Graham, and Haruki Murakami have written about writing to think and learn.
It’s by writing about a subject we’re trying to learn that we reason our way to what it means.
If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
Perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person, but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing.
But I'd take it one step further. Instead of keeping our notes hidden in our notetaking apps, we should publish them. Having a public audience forces us to write clearly. And that requires clear thinking.
Isn't that hard? That's the point!
I have been publishing on my website for more than a decade, and no essay ever felt easy to write. But we learn from and remember the pieces we struggle to write. Michael Nielsen shared:
Funnily enough, spending time stuck is incredibly important. That used to just be annoying. Now it seems like it’s maybe even the most important part of the whole process. That hard-won nature of it means that I internalize it afterwards. I’ve written 10,000-word essays in a couple of days, and I’ve written them in three months or six months. I feel like I didn’t learn very much from the ones that only took a couple of days. Whereas some of the ones that took three months, 15 years later, I’ll still remember.
Write, then publish.