I’ve been writing for a while now.

It started when I was 20 years old, in my 3rd year of University. Some how, I wanted to improve my life in just about every dimension: fitness, finances, career, skills, relationships, and overall satisfaction. I had no idea how to go about doing that. And so as a way of brainstorming I started to write!

My life has changed drastically since then. Yet I can directly attribute many of the positive changes I’ve had in life to the habit of writing. Below I share the many benefits that I’ve personally experienced from writing.

More, Better Ideas

Writing things down forces your brain to think more deeply. You have to mentally search for the abstract ideas in your head and somehow convert them into words. Ideally, words that form razor sharp thoughts!

Engaging your mind in that manner is a catalyst for generating great new ideas. While writing, your mind ends up wandering ever so slightly in different directions, exploring areas that you’ve never deliberately looked at yourself. Those areas are where you find the best ideas to solve your problems. It’s new space with new ideas, but still related enough to what you wanted to think about.

Writing to Think is a great article that dives deeper into this.

Learning from Mistakes

Reflecting on your decisions in your head is way too difficult. Personally, I find it hard to remember everything. And trying to keep the many memories in my head all at the same time so I can review them collectively only causes stress. There’s just too much information.

Writing helps with that because you transfer all those memories onto paper. The paper does the heavy lifting for you so you don’t have keep it all in your head. Then you can more easily look at all your ideas at once, focusing your energy on the more valuable part: learning from what you’ve written.

And speaking of learning…

Writing –> Reading –> More Learning

As you write things down, you’ll need to think to retrieve information. But often times you either won’t remember something or you realize that you don’t know enough about a thing to write down all that you need to write. Thus you end up searching for resources to fill the gap which naturally leads to…

Reading!

You go read things with the aim of answering your questions. Blogs, articles, research papers, books, and more. Those resources often have not only the direct answers to your questions, but even more ideas that you learn from.

Working backwords…

Learning is the final destination
Reading is the path
Writing is the inspiration for the journey

And that’s why I write!