“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”—Enid Bagnold
"Good Writing is clear thinking made visible"-Bill Wheeler
Good writing makes the thinking clear, it removes all the dust from your thoughts and thinking.
Sometimes we think why people give their time to write the
answers on Quora, give review of a product or write blogs. What they will
get, why they write, what benefits they get and the same kind of questions.
Before starting my blog and before starting reading the books,
I also think in the same way that why to waste time to write and think instead
just read other people's blog and save the time and invest this time in other
activities like chit chat on phone, chat on Whats App, watch and like photos of
other virtual friends on social media, watch TV and the same kind of activities….
With the time, and with the improvement in my reading habit,
I come to know that reading and writing is the best thing you can do to help
other human beings to know more and to help yourself as well.
As Charlie Munger said:
“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”
And how you can help the other human being to know more is
by teaching or by guiding or by sharing your learning. In this post, I am
going to share some of my learning on writing, why I started to write this
blog, what I get by writing and similar king of questions. Please be with me and
read the full post.
To learn anything better, write it down on a piece of paper.
We may be too much modern, we may have any gadget but any gadget cannot replace
a pan and a paper to learn anything in a proper way, if you don’t believe it
just try it.
James Mangan said:
“To know it - write it! If you’re writing to explain, you’re explaining it to yourself! If you’re writing to inspire, you’re inspiring yourself! If you’re writing to record, you’re recording it on your own memory. How often you have written something down in order to be sure you would have a record of it, only to find that you never needed the written record because you had learned it by heart!”
To get more knowledgeable and get smarter you need to follow
Charlie Munger. What Charlie Munger said on how to become smart is:
"If you want to get smart, the question you have to keep asking is “why, why, why, why?“
Some of your whys will be answered by reading books or blogs
but most of the whys come to your mind while writing your thoughts or your learning on a piece of paper or on your blog and While writing you get many
Whys to get answered, that will force you to read more books or blogs and write
more. By doing this, you will be on the path of the worldly wisdom.
Now let see, what you get by writing a blog or a journal or
your thoughts on a piece of paper.
1: A deep understanding of the subject:
when you read a book on a topic, you look for some questions to get answered by the author. And by reading the book, you get a deep
understanding of the subject. In the book The Little Book of Talent: 52
Tips for Improving Your Skills author Dan Coyle writes
“Research shows that people who follow strategy B [read ten pages at once, then close the book and write a one-page summary] remember 50 percent more material over the long term than people who follow strategy A [read ten pages four times in a row and try to memorize them]. This is because of one of deep practice’s most fundamental rules: Learning is reaching. Passively reading a book—a relatively effortless process, letting the words wash over you like a warm bath—doesn’t put you in the sweet spot. Less reaching equals less learning.
On the other hand, closing the book and writing a summary forces you to figure out the key points (one set of reaches), process and organize those ideas so they make sense (more reaches), and write them on the page (still more reaches, along with repetition). The equation is always the same: More reaching equals more learning.”
2: Answer of your Whys and get a reason to read more:
If you are looking to understand the world, why things happens, what are the reasons behind any event, the cause and the outcome, then you first need to understand that the world is a complex adaptive
system and everything is relating to everything else in the world. It is a king
of butter fly effect in action. Take an example of Stock market, a simple news
of any continent on the planet, will impact the world's stock market.
To understand the bigger picture of the cause and outcome,
read more books from different fields. Be a voracious reader like Charlie
Munger.
Once you are curious to know something, then you get the best
of your answers from the books only.
To become a wiser person, follow the advice from Charlie
Munger:
“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.”
3: You get Happiness:
Reading and writing will bring happiness to your life. To
get the happiness, lets reverse the argument and ask what is the root cause of
the problems?
Blaise pascal have the answer of this question. What Blaise Pascal
said,
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
We don’t have a tendency to sit ideal if we don’t have
anything to do, it’s a human nature. We always look for more of everything, and in
order to get more, we end up with misery.
My friend, remember Less is more.
If you start reading and writing in your free time,
instead of seeking for more, you invest your time on nurturing your mind and soul.
And someone who always nurture his mind and soul, will be always in inner
peace.
Once everything will be settled inside the reflection
obviously come outside.
4: you learn more:
By reading and writing you improve your
learning. You know that what you need to learn and you know that how you can
learn that. Just read lots of books on the subject then write it down in your
own way or teach it to someone.
While you are on your learning path, don’t fool yourself. As
Richard Feynman said:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
By reading and writing, you come to know the difference between knowing
the name of something and knowing that thing. AS Richard feynman said:
“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
5: Your writing skills improve:
It is no doubt, your writing skills will improve with time, if you start reading and writing your own thoughts on the subject. You can see my improvement on this blog in last 6 to 7 months, read the first blog post of TheRandomWisdom blog and then read this blog post, you can find the difference.
Your improved writing skill help you to Convey your
understanding and thoughts better to the other person. It will help you to grow
at your work place as well.
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
6: Your reading, observing and imagination skills will
improve:
While reading a good, you are in an argument on the subject with the
author. You try to know why the author wrote whatever he had written, what the
surrounding forces that force him to write. By this you understand the empathy, you are putting your leg in the writer's shoes and thinking like the author.
You understand the environment of the writer and the time period of the writer.
You imagine the world in your mind and you start observing the things more
closely.
After a point of time, this observation and imagination will
help you to take better decisions in your life.
AS Alfred Whitney
Griswold said:
“The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.”
And the better ideas will come to you by
reading only.
7: Your thought and learning will be organized:
To improve the quality of your life, you need
be organized internally and externally. I have asked by many of my friends that they don’t get time and
how I get the time of reading and writing while doing the same job as they do
for their bread and butter. My reply to them only that organize your time and
day properly- Organize yourself properly.
Your mind is a temple, so place the right attic at the right
place in this temple. Apply the same logic to your life as well. Start adopting
right habits, your quality of life will improve and you always get enough time
to do the things that you always want to do. Erase the bad habits from your life like TV, Chit chat on mobile, Whats app, Social medial etc
The author of the Harry potter series J. K. Rowling said:
“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
8: Improve mood and reduce stress:
Due to entire day work pressure and the people at the work place
and too much work, we get the stress. Writing and reading is the best therapy
to get stress free mind and mood. Just try it, you will have amazed by the improvement.
On
the relation of reading, writing and stress, Adam Grant
said -
"Expressive writing has also been linked to improved mood, well-being, and reduced stress levels for those who do it regularly."
Research by Laura King shows that writing about
achieving future goals and dreams can make people happier and healthier... And it
is found that when people doing stressful fund raising jobs kept a journal
for a few days about how their work made a difference, they increased their
hourly effort by 29% over the next two weeks.
9: Improve your communication skills:
If you read more and write more, it is obvious that you mind
is well wired on so many areas of the world, so when the time come to argue on
any given topic, you perform better than a person who don’t read or write.
Mark Twain said:
The Man Who Does Not Read Has No Advantage Over the Man Who Cannot Read
In both emotional intelligence and in hard
sciences like mathematics, writing has been shown to help
people communicate highly complex ideas more effectively.
Brian Tracy said:
"Communication is a skill that you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or typing. If you're willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life."
10: Help to handle tough times:
If you are a continuous reader of good books and a writer,
you come to know that the leaders of the world have faced many tough situations
in their life and your current situation is nothing in front of them.
In
one study that
followed recently fired engineers, the researchers found that those engineers
who consistently engaged with expressive writing were able to find another job
faster.
Says Adam Grant:
“The engineers who wrote down their thoughts and feelings about losing their jobs reported feeling less anger and hostility toward their former employer. They also reported drinking less. Eight months later, less than 19% of the engineers in the control groups were reemployed full-time, compared with more than 52% of the engineers in the expressive writing group.”
There will be many more benefits of reading good books and
writing your own blog or your own book or a journal.
- Brings positive to your life:
Study shows that the subjects who reflected
on the good things in their life once a week by writing them down were more
positive and motivated about their current situations and their futures.
- Improve your concentration:
Getting important
ideas down alleviates the stress of losing your thoughts to time or an
overcrowded mind.
- Improve your learning skill:
Information often sticks better when it’s
learned as though it needs to be taught or re-written in your own words. This
concept never fully clicked with me until I started writing regularly.
- You will communicate with clarity:
Unlike
talking, when you write you look for more sophisticated words and expressions
to describe what you have in mind. This helps you build a structure that will
allow you to express yourself better and communicate complex ideas in a much
more effective way.
- You will eliminate stress:
you
empty your mind - by capturing everything that comes to it—to eliminate the
stress that causes having many things hitting your head, writing and developing
your ideas produces an amplified effect since not only you take them out of
your mind but also the whole process of rationalization that otherwise would
abstractly stay in there.
- You will be more productive:
Writing
activates the neurons in your brain and gets it ready to overcome the rest of
the tasks (you can use it as a kind of warm-up at the beginning of the day). In
addition, writing down your tasks with the
appropriate words prepares you to carry them out
properly. Finally, it’s demonstrated that setting your
goals in writing increases significantly the
possibilities of achieving them.
- You will learn more:
Writing
in your own words the information that you receive helps you assimilating and
consolidating knowledge that otherwise you would forget soon.
- You will gain awareness of your reality:
If you write down what you have in mind each
day, what you expect to achieve and how you feel according to this, you won’t
need a psychologist to explain you who you are. You will realize yourself.
- You will make better decisions:
When
writing you clear up your thoughts and, obviously, a clearer thinking allows
you to make better choices.
- You will be happier:
It’s an immediate consequence of the two
previous points. There is no need to write a public blog, a sort of personal
journal is perfectly valid.
- You will live more focused:
If you constantly write about your thoughts
you will never get out of sight what you want to achieve, which your dreams
are.
- You will overcome tough moments faster:
There
is some research that
suggests that those that write about what is happening overcome tough moments
quicker than those who don’t.
- You will have a lot of written memories:
If
you write each day, you will have a historical record of your thoughts,
probably something much more interesting than a simple photo album. And, who
knows, maybe you end up publishing a book.
- Improve creativity:
To write good stuff, you need to
thing and to thing good stuff you need to write and read, so it is a positive
feedback loop and at the end you will get knowledge and skill.
- May be your make some money:
This is for the people who think of
making money. By writing and reading you can make money as well. By writing
good blog and good content, you can make money.
I will end this post with the beautiful quote :
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”—George Orwell
-Keep reading, Keep learning
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-Mahesh
