I think high-performing people generally fall into this trap: we obsess about the external world while neglecting our internal world.

Writing increases your rate of revelation. This is true irrespective of the subject because writing is a process of reflection, assertion, and iteration.

Writing clarifies your own ideas. Writing begets new ideas too. Writing lets you explore ideas in depth even if you won’t have time to act on them all. Writing shows people how you think and lets ... See more

I recognize the irony here of describing understanding through words, and you being the person that’s internalizing it as knowledge. But with that said, therein lies the value of writing. Writing is an attempt to share your lived experience with others, which makes you face the blind spots in your own thinking in real-time. When you write, it becom... See more

when someone tells me to keep writing, it feels like a command to keep living.

Questions are also indications of directions of curiosity. They remind me of desire paths : pathways in the grass that emerge organically from people's natural patterns of movement instead of prescribed routes. They’re such a wonderfully human example of how we like to follow impulse and intuition to find the most direct (or appealing way) to get s... See more

Knowledge responds to the gravitational pull of questions: new questions, and new questions about old questions.

We think in questions. If knowledge is a complex web inside the mind, each node is a question, and each connecting line the information you’ve picked up on the journey from node to node. The pursuit of knowledge is the accumulation of questions. They shape our identity as much by being asked as by being answered.

Conviction is an extension of self-knowledge. It emerges from your experiences and prior conditions. To know that is to know yourself. Being someone with conviction is really just living with clarity, and everything else is downstream of this self-knowledge.