Day 1 - Daily Writings to No One

Covering why and how to write to no one

Why write in this form?

The idea is simple. Writing allows clear thinking which allows clear communication. Writing is thinking. And the thoughts will be recorded for my future self creating more opportunities for learning and self-understanding.

This sort of directed public writing for an imagined audience will allow me to practice communicating my ideas. Hopefully, I will learn to teach, write, and converse better.

How should I write?

The goal will be deep, clear thinking. Words will be chosen carefully for truth or clarity of communication. A core idea of this blog will be gathering, considering, and weighing multiple paradigms. Anything trite will be avoided and it should just be the minimal diff between general knowledge and the new idea. Brevity and clear organization for skimming are essential.

Set a timer for under an hour and the article must be published by the time it finishes.

Here are some meta writing ideas I want to explore:

• The imagined audience

  • is myself/someone with all my background knowledge

  • a specific, reasonably smart friend who is asking for my help

• Each essay

  • has a specific question to answer or ask e.g How do you actually help people? What does it mean to be a good person?

  • Is optimistic and hopeful that there is a good, warm, positive answer

• Going beyond paragraph formatting to bulleted lists, etc to allow easier skimming and juxtaposition

• How to write better and faster? Should I track ideas I want to write about somewhere to make this easier? Should I generate topics for me to write about through ChatGPT? Like should I be a therapist for ChatGPT.

Ideas I want to explore:

• What resonates with me from my daily life and why? Avoid writing that is too reflective, and remember there is an audience that wants generalizable takes.

• Given an event or narrative, what are different perspectives you can embody? And how can you not just understand it intellectually, but emotionally? How can you inhabit and feel that mental and emotional state?

• What are my failings? What are specific actionable, object-level things I can notice or do to improve?

  • Girls and relationships - What are specific actions or perspectives to make people feel more comfortable, and understood, and reduce miscommunication?

  • Coding, startups - How do I program faster? What are real experiments we can run with an actual idea or testable hypothesis I believe in? What do we not know?

• Creating a guide for Jorge i.e when you feel/think X you should do/remember Y.

Failure modes/worries

• Writing will be too reflexive, self-pitying, and shallow and just circle the same ideas instead of propelling the creation of new ones

• Without real feedback, I will not become a better writer or communicator