Many of my favorite lessons in life come from people I’ve never met. To me, this is a fascinating phenomenon to ponder, but what’s more important than marveling at this phenomenon is to recognize what makes this phenomenon possible which is the practice of writing.
The practice of writing can empower you in two ways. First, when others write, it can empower you to improve yourself and your own life by learning from the lived experiences of others. Second, when you write, it empowers you to refine your thinking, reinforce your understanding, identify knowledge gaps, and uncover new insights.
Two individuals that I’ve never met, but have made a positive impact on my life by emphasizing the value of writing as a vehicle for growth, are William Zinsser and Mortimer Adler.
In his book Writing to Learn, Zinsser addresses this concept and says, “Reduce your discipline—whatever it is—to a logical sequence of clearly thought sentences. You will find out whether you know your subject as well as you thought you did. If you don’t, writing will show you where the holes are in your knowledge or your reasoning.”
In On Writing Well, Zinsser summarizes this concept by saying, “Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.”
Clear thinking and clear writing happen at the level of the individual; you are responsible for developing clear thoughts and clear sentences. If nothing else, you can improve yourself and your own life through the reading of valuable or challenging texts. However, after you have created a clear thought and transformed it into a clear sentence, you have the option to make it available to others. In this event, you have the power to inform and shape the thoughts and sentences of others. Over time, a written idea can spread amongst a large audience and lead to change and progress.
In How to Read a Book, Adler provides an overview of this process when he suggests, “The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”
The phrase “great authors” is subjective, but Adler suggests—and I believe rightfully so—that great authors plant seeds in the minds of others. Those seeds can keep their core ideas but grow into elaborated ideas in the minds of others. This process—taking what someone else has thought or learned and refining and elaborating upon it with your own lived experiences—is the evolution of wisdom.
But your wisdom, nor our collective societal wisdom, will not evolve or mature if you never push your mental boundaries. Adler encourages you to read writing that challenges you because growth—for all areas of life—occurs when you’re pushed beyond your comfort zone. Adler says, “If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.”
I’ve long been a practitioner of reading to learn and taking notes while doing so. However, I wanted a better method for consolidating key learnings and documenting them in a way that is easier to access and revisit compared to scribbled notes in the margins of a book or in the closest spare notebook. Thus, I decided to start a blog to document key ideas and lessons I’ve learned in personal wealth and financial wealth. My hope is twofold: First, I want to refine and accelerate my own thinking through the practice of writing. Second, by making this public, I want to provide the opportunity to learn alongside me so that you can evolve and mature your own wisdom.
Here’s to remembering and practicing this key lesson:
“Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.”
— William Zinsser