Why Do We Read and Write? Appreciating That Opposites Attract
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Yurui’s Summary
Writing and reading are both immensely powerful for learning, cementing, and clarifying ideas. If you don’t read or write at the moment, I’d highly recommend it to accelerate your learning.
I’ve been blogging for about four months now and journaling for nearly three years. Here’s what I’ve learnt about the process of reading and writing; these ideas are all framed expertly by Paul Graham (one of the co-founders of Y Combinator) and his essays.
Writing about something shows that you didn't know it as well as you thought. As such, putting ideas into words is a severe test. Ideas that end up in an essay will consist of what you thought of while you were writing it, editing, and rewriting.
Reading what you've written is an important test. You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing of what's in your head, only what you wrote. Make your ideas as good as you can and still satisfy a stranger reading your words.
With every blog article I write, I always ask three close friends who are similar enough to relate with my content, but different enough to have their own conviction and opinion to read my work and provide feedback.
It’s possible to form complete ideas in your head. You can play chess in your head; you can do maths in your head, though mathematicians don't seem to feel sure of a proof over a certain length till they write it down. By thinking, you’re putting ideas into words in your head. Sometimes I write in my head, while I’m walking, at the gym, or lying in bed. I'm writing when I do this. I'm doing the mental part of writing and finding clarity with my ideas; my fingers just aren't moving as I do it.
You can know a great deal about something without writing about it. But can you ever know so much that you wouldn't learn more from trying to explain what you know? I don't think so. When I write, there are things I don’t consciously realise until I have to explain them. A great deal of knowledge is unconscious, and experts have a higher proportion of unconscious knowledge than beginners.
However much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you'll still learn new things from writing about them.
Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also dictate. Writing is the stricter test; you have to commit to a single, optimal sequence of words and conform to lexical conventions of text. Less can go unsaid when you don't have a tone of voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem excessive in conversation. Paul Graham often spends 2 weeks on an essay and reread drafts 50 times. If you did that in conversation it would seem evidence of some kind of mental disorder.
Putting ideas into words is certainly no guarantee that they'll be right. Far from it. But though it's not a sufficient condition, it is a necessary one.
Reading about something doesn't just teach you about something; it also teaches you how to write.
Writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.
A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.
If you need to solve a complicated, ill-defined problem, it will almost always help to write about it. Someone who's not good at writing will be at a disadvantage in solving such problems.
You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. You have to be good at reading, and read good things.
People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can't afford to.
Yurui
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Appreciating that Opposites Attract
May 14th, 2023
Everyone has an own unique perspective, shaped by their personal experiences. Learning revolves around disagreement and collaboration, not echo chambers.
My mum always told me that as humans, we are ultimately limited by our mortality and can only live one life. But through the power of literature, we can live the lives of hundreds of people.
Understanding the words of someone else reveals a completely new way of how I can approach life. Words truly transcend the boundaries of time and space. I can time-travel to 500 years ago and draw ‘wisdom’ from the Elizabethan era in England, as I experience what they’ve experienced.
Words and stories have the power to help us understand the things that make us different, aiding us in the process of acknowledging differing perspectives.
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I’ve had this blog up and running for around a month now. It’s genuinely heartwarming and amazingly rewarding to have received your messages over the past few weeks; the simple ‘thanks so much for writing this, yurui. you’ve genuinely influenced how I think about the world’ is so sweet :)))
As a result, I’ve journaled 13375 words and 38 pages in my 65000 word document journal in the past 31 days. I made the journal at the end of 2020. Yeah, it’s been an interesting month; I’ve written 20% of my total journal in one month of its 30 month history. Funny stuff.
But today, I want to acknowledge the importance of disagreement. I say this way too much, but I think that everyone has their own unique perspective, which is shaped by their personal experiences. I’ve come to realise that I learn so much from talking with people with different opinions as me; for that is what learning revolves around, not echo chambers, but instead, deep, philosophical and logical discussion about interesting topics. And I guess that’s what my blog invites: serendipity.
Reading has taught me so much as well: not only paperback novels filled with the life works of the most famous philosophers, but also personal blogs scattered across the internet. I’d like to think that my blog invites you, the reader, to consider life from a nuanced perspective.
I wrote a discursive for my English Mod C a few weeks and one of my mates said I should post it on my blog; please note that I do not condone plagiarism. This is my own work lol. Here it is :)))
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To Read or Not to Read: The Power of Sharing Perspectives Through Literature
Google Books estimated that there have been something like 129,864,880 books published since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press more than five hundred years ago. More than a hundred million. But in reality, the typical self-published author sells about five copies of their book. Yep. Hundreds of hours spent at their desk, thinking, drafting, writing, and publishing. They hope that their words will have some sort of impression on the people around them.
It’s insane how life in modern times is completely packed with distractions; mindless scrolling on Tiktok, controversial news channels, and addictive video games have made it so damn hard to just sit down and read. Even on the off chance that I do find the time to get cosy with some sort of literature, the reality is that there’s only ever been one Dickens, one Hemingway, and one Shakespeare. What motivation are people supposed to have when they think about writing their own stuff nowadays?
But writers have the opportunity to leverage one of the most powerful tools in the world. With the invention of the internet, it’s become easier than ever to express your own opinion to the masses of society. Even personal blogs - thousands of which lay scattered, lost in the cosmos of the internet - are packed to the brim with textual gold, comprising key insights their authors have learnt as they look in retrospect at the lives they’ve lived.
As a kid in my final year of high school, I can’t tell you how much I want to just be free of the constraints that our educational system constitutes. I want to spend my time in some sort of ‘intellectual freedom’, learning what I actually want to learn, and reading what I actually want to read. But I mean, you gotta do what you gotta do. I just tell myself that the grass will be greener on the other side.
This one bloke in particular, Naval Ravikant, isn’t exactly an ‘author’. His insights learnt as an entrepreneur and investor inspired some pretty deep thinking. Let me share a quote that I found super cool:
“What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we're just squandering it?”
At least to me, Naval’s ideas have revealed a whole new perspective to view the world with. Maybe the grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side of the hill; instead, what if it was greener wherever we watered it?
I’ve asked some of my friends this question as well. And I’ve also realised that the value of discussions with both like-minded others and those with opposing views is criminally underrated, as we share perspectives with each other. My mum always told me that as humans, we are ultimately limited by our mortality and can only live one life. But through the power of literature, we can live the lives of hundreds of people.
Through exploring the musings of greater men than me, I’ve been able to extract the best of their findings; such as how we can leverage Rene Girard’s mimetic theory to boost productivity by assessing our environment, ditto with Richard Thaler’s nudge theory. Considering the philosophies of Marcus Aurelius, comparing and contrasting his Meditations with Laozi’s Dao De Jing led me to consider how I can incorporate Stoicism and Daoism into my own life. Taking a piggyback (yet also a bird’s eye view) on the philosophical debate between the schools of existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism, has acted as a prompt to take a side while climbing this mountain that we call life.
Looking back at what I’ve just written, I really shouldn’t just hone in on the works of the most famous men of history. In an ideal world, I’d have the resources and commitment to listen to as many stories as possible. Perhaps it’s the abundance of time that compels so many people to take gap years.
But we all have lives to live, no? Jobs to do, university degrees to finish, significant others to find (one day, hopefully). We can’t just dwell on inaction and just think about stuff, or read about the life stories of the random guys down the street. Though doing so would generate some value, how does one find a balance between the theory of others and the practical actions of oneself?
I guess that from my perspective as a naive kid in high school, as I sit in my room and look out of the window at the hills in the distance, wondering what life has in store for me, I’ve come to realise that reading the work of someone else reveals a completely new way in regard to how I can approach life.
I truly think that words transcend the boundaries of space and even time. I can time-travel to 500 years ago and draw ‘wisdom’ from the Elizabethan era in England, as I experience what they’ve experienced. Though many writers are neglected by the majority of humanity, even if their storytelling and contribution to literature impacts just one other person, I think that it’s worth all those late nights working on a manuscript. Anything that comes afterwards is extra.
Words and stories have the power to help us understand the things that make us different, aiding us in the process of acknowledging differing perspectives. Even if we can’t find the time to read, or if books are way too diluted to have an impact, we need to persevere. Learning how other people live their lives is so crucial as we pursue the improvement of humanity.
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Hope you enjoyed this!
Yurui
