Essay writing is generally considered no more than a school or college assignment in India. Whereas majority of successful entrepreneurs, artists, thinkers and writers(especially from the west) insist everyone on writing essays for clear thinking. Why?
Sam Altman has an active blog for over 13 years. Marc Andreesen writes essays, and so does Jeff Bezos. Almost all big names in business ask people to write essays. Why do these people recommend writing essays for self-growth? And why do they think consuming and creating other forms of content—like watching videos and audiobooks—won’t bring about as much impact? What is so special about writing that it has the power to transform a person’s life? Let’s dive right in.
Window for self-analysis
Writing offers you a window for self-analyses. Putting your thoughts on paper allows you to see where your thinking lacks logic or needs further refinement. More often than not, the thoughts you record on the paper will will stare right back at you—making you question your IQ, whether you are abnormal, and having you wonder what made you think you qualify to write the article in the first place. These painful realisations that arise from the weak logics you come up with somehow nudges you to shift your thinking. This repeated loop of introspection happens every damn time you write.
Validate your ideas and thinking patterns
And what’s even cooler is how writing lets you cross-compare your worldview. The blogs, videos, books and other materials you research to write an essay clearly point out which parts of your ideas need rework. These comparisons help you break down and understand what exactly you could do to improve your thinking patterns. This ultimately would mean you won’t be a rigid asshole who is fixated with his own beliefs (that’s not even his) for the rest of his life. Instead, you will be someone who changes his thinking often as a result of writing often.
Refrain from outside influences
Most of the beliefs we carry to this day aren’t ours. The environment we grew up in, our friends, family and the media we were exposed to as teenagers play an essential part in shaping our beliefs. Do we change these beliefs once we step into adulthood? No, not necessarily. Our ego stands in the way even if we take voluntary effort to change. The only way any change becomes even remotely possible is when someone realizes it on their own. And that only happens when someone thinks on paper. When writing, our ego takes the back seat. Therefore self-change feels easier.
You can become somewhat of an expert
Writing makes you somewhat of an expert across a broad spectrum of fields. When you commit yourself to writing about a specific topic, you will put in a ton of thinking and research into it. You will sit with the piles of data about the topic, your critical thinking and all the time in the world—which basically is a recipe for becoming an expert in any field. You research, think, cross-check, and edit and… repeat. Imagine doing this for gazillions of topics over an extended period of time in your life. This way, you can’t help but become incredibly smart at a broader spectrum of topics.
Delegate everything but writing
Non-thinkers and thinkers…
In one of Paul Graham’s recent essays he warns us about how in a few years down the lane the world will be divided into two classes of people. Writes and write-nots (or thinkers and non-thinkers): people who posses the ability to write and people who don’t. And what would cause this division, he says, is our reliance on AI chatbots for writing tasks.
How is relying on AI for writing is even a big problem? Historically, we have been outsourcing our tedious labors to new machines that keep rolling out year after year. Writing essays and emails happens to be one of those boring and time-consuming jobs we delegate. Isn’t that so?
Logically, that may sound smart, indeed—at least on the surface. But what we fail to realise here is that when we outsource our writing to AI, it isn’t just the tedious job we are outsourcing, but our thinking. When this outsourcing habit continues for years, we will eventually erode our thinking capability.
When you sit down to write essays you are actually sitting down to think. Because writing is thinking which happens on paper. The more you write, the more you think. And the more you think, the better you will shape your thoughts and ideas. You will develop critical problem solving chops(which is how you solve personal, professional and societal problems); and you will become more articulate as the result of thinking of different sentence structures and frameworks on paper. Communication enhances.
When you delegate the writing job to AI, you will hamper all these. And gradually, you will find it too exhausting to even think on your own. You will be so lazy that you will let others do all the thinking for you. Good luck on that. Let me know how that goes.
A Society that Values essayists Flourishes
Any society that values essay writers has always progressed forward. The ideas people generate while sitting down to write essays have shaped cultures, spurred numerous innovations and inspired how people think generations after generations. When people stop writing(thinking), how are they going to contribute to the pool of ideas that the present and future generation of society is going to benefit and learn from?
Keeping a society away from understanding the importance of writing and reading essays can have serious repercussions. It’s almost like silent warfare to erode people’s capacity to think.
So, is writing essays the only weapon against this warfare then? You ask?
Well, not really.
Writing books makes you incredibly smart, of course. It opens your mind like no other. But how many of us can take time off our life to write a whole damn book? The mini version of that is writing essays. A place where you can experiment with ideas and ignite new ones.
More thinkers is all we need.
There’s always been demand for essayists in India. At present, we do have some concentration of essay writers/thinkers. But if we are aiming for an exponential shift in people’s thinking and therefore India’s growth, we will need more clusters of writers who can disseminate good ideas to people in their radar and beyond. The cumulative effect of these writers can do wonders to a nation. Young people need such inspiration should the nation progress.
Akash
Morjim, Goa.
