Learn Faster, Think Clearly

Why you need to learn to write, even if you are not a writer

This essay is a small milestone, the tenth I have put out on this newsletter, so I am writing about the habit underneath all of them: writing itself.

If you don’t know what skill to learn, learn how to write. Writing is one of the best teachers for learning how to think, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer or have never liked writing. I have been writing since I was young, first in my Dad's old diaries, later I took it seriously and started buying the same black journals, and I have kept at it for a decade now.

I write every other day. And yet I don't call myself a writer. What I identify with is the byproduct: the disciplined process of learning how to think through and articulate my ideas better. So this is why I advocate for people to start writing, it is a superpower like no other.

I don’t think I could have ever become the version of me I am today if I didn’t write, and I see it most clearly in my work. Thinking through a research brief, a strategy document, a presentation, or a proposal means sitting with my thoughts and creating the best ideas I can come up with. Most of that is writing, drafting ideas, reviewing them, and arriving at the best articulated version for execution.

A strategy document is thinking made visible. And whatever your role, your work already runs on writing: emails, proposals, presentations and everything in between. The only question is whether you practise it deliberately or by accident.

Ten years of deliberate practice have convinced me there are three things writing does that nothing else quite does.

1. Writing forces you to think

The core mechanism is forced linearity. You can feel like you understand something in your head, but writing forces you to collapse it into a single stream. Thinking without writing is like standing in a forest where every direction looks open. Writing is cutting one path through it: you must decide where you are going, which turns to take, and how to find your way back when you get lost. It is the gym where your mind is built.

This matters because you may feel you understand your values, your beliefs, and the counterarguments running in your head. Until you write them out, I can almost guarantee you don't. Either they collapse on the page, or you discover they were adopted from someone else without question. I have become harder to influence over the years, not because I stopped listening, but because writing taught me to interrogate ideas before I take them in.

2. Writing changes what you notice

I am also a photographer (a story for another day). After a few years of serious practice, you start to see frames and compositions in everyday life. When you take a picture and compose the scene in your mind, you start paying attention to details that everyone else walks right past.

Committing to writing regularly does the same thing to your intellect.

Once you adopt the habit of documenting your life and insights, your everyday work becomes a constant source of material. A failed project outline, an awkward client interaction, or a subtle operational bottleneck ceases to be a mere frustration. It becomes a case study. Writing sharpens your pattern recognition, allowing you to extract strategic lessons from daily chaos.

3. Writing is how you learn, and how you find out you haven't

Psychology has a name for this: the ‘protégé effect’. Students who teach material they are learning retain it far better than students who merely study it, because explaining something to someone else forces deeper processing and exposes the gaps in their knowledge.

The thing about learning is that, when you read something, you feel like you get it. But when you try to write about it, you often discover you don't. Most people take this as proof they aren't "qualified" to write about it because they don’t know much about the topic. However, identifying the knowledge gap gives a good starting point for what to learn next, which you would never have found without trying to write it down.

Most of writing is research anyway. I have learnt more in my years of serious journaling and writing than in all my years of formal education. The reason is simple: you cannot put down sentence B until sentence A establishes the context. The moment you attempt to translate abstract ideas into structured text, your brain is forced to resolve contradictions, organise logic, and bridge gaps. Writing does not merely record your thoughts; it creates them. It forces you to move past shallow surface understanding and construct a coherent argument.

You do not need to identify as a “writer” to capture the benefits of the craft. The purpose of writing for your life or career is to help you think and plan more clearly.

In an interview, Eileen Gu, a freestyle skier and multi-Olympic gold medalist, was asked, Do you think before you speak? Because you answer questions so quickly and so comprehensively, can you take us through your brain? She said,

“…I am just a pensive person, I am a very introspective person, young woman, I spend a lot of time in my head. And it’s not a bad place to be. I journal a lot, I break down all of my thought processes, and I apply a very analytical lens to my own thinking, and I kind of modify it. It’s so interesting, you can control what you think, you can control how you think and therefore you can control who you are. And especially as a young person, I can literally become who I want to be. How cool and empowering is that? I get to become every day the kind of person that me at age 8 would revere, and that’s the biggest flex of all time that. Yes, I spend a lot of time in my head , yes I think a lot but it’s not in an egostical way, it’s in a tinkering, like a scientist kind of way. I am always trying to modify it. I am always trying to think how can I be better?. How can I approach my own brain the way I approach my craft of free skiing so that I can be better tomorrow than I was today.”

You write to untangle your own thoughts. You write to test your assumptions. You write to build a clear, disciplined mind. If you fight the hard battle of articulating your ideas in plain language today, professional clarity and career leverage will follow naturally tomorrow.