Writing has been maligned as something only writers do. This piece is an attempt to set things right.
The cause has champions more consequential than humble Medium bloggers. To Amazon and the world of business, Jeff Bezos introduced the idea of the six-page, printed-on-both-sides memo. The written word, appropriately structured and paragraphed, affords the collision of ideas and their eventual refinement in the mind of the writer - even before a single bit is communicated.
At least for important product concepts, the memo replaced the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint is a barbaric medium that reduces the infinite composability of text into bullet points, a construct that lays false claim to the precision of mathematics without any of mathematics’ manoeuvrability.
It helped that Bezos was married to a writer. A very good one, in fact. The great Toni Morrison once wrote a recommendation letter for the former Mrs. Bezos.
Thus begins my manifesto:
#1 Writing is for everybody. There is no holy war between soft, imprecise humanities types, and hard, clear thinking engineering types. There is no siren call asking you to swear allegiance to the latter and reject the former. Writing applies as much to system design trade-offs as sonnets.
#2 Writing is organised self-interrogation. “Elicitation” is how one unlocks knowledge that resides in minds that are scarcely aware they are in possession of said knowledge. Ask the right expert the right question, and the world is yours. Writing is how one prongs one’s own self for elicitation. The associations every word put to paper create form the prompt that retrieves things long buried. This association is what generates the next word. Think of writing as a prompt generator for a large language model, except that the model has a lot more than language.
Perchance if we were locked up in a room with Charlie Munger, the right question would yield the mysteries of the universe. The wrong question would lead to the great man’s take on Warren Buffet’s Cherry Coke habit. The more one meanders on the page, the higher the chances of posing the right, well-formed question that hooks the exact memory, the exact insight that was just waiting all these years to be fished out and see the light of day.
#3 Write to find gaps, errors, and inconsistencies in belief systems. You might feel strongly about a technology wave or a political movement. The thesis might seem internally coherent. What’s more, the thesis might even explain things in the real world. But then, try writing down all the assumptions that underpin the thesis. It might not hold up. The things that need to be true for the thesis to be defensible are likely too many. Nobody is smart enough to contain every variable in play in working memory.
I don’t know how many of the 140-IQ folks who led and rode the crypto surge in 2021 tried querying their own minds on the subject of what could make the blockchain business work long term. If someone did try, they would find their own fingers on QWERTY moving effortlessly, listing thing after thing, like an ouija board for the self.
Perhaps they’d type:
Actually a lot…but it would end with:
“The nation state has been the basis of organising society for centuries now. The necessary elements of the nation state are territorial integrity and a…currency. The latter — held stable by an independent central bank — is essential to everyday commerce, and both short and long-term business planning. The monopoly over violence and the monopoly over currency is not something a nation state can concede without risking catastrophe.
If it were to happen at all, such as with the Euro, a common superstructure across nation states comes only after decades of careful design and deliberation, and despite all the planning — remains fragile.
Will BTC work? To comment meaningfully on the subject, we need to ask is monopoly over currency central to the nation state. And, will the nation state remain the irreducible unit of sovereign governance in the coming decade?
At the very least, it can be said such questions far transcend tech and business and require skills in excess of what crypto engineers, PMs, and VCs have.”
#4 Write an account of things at the time of important decisions. Research says remembering is not retrieval. Remembering is reconstruction. Memory is not a database. The mind is a revisionist historian (or a politician) that arranges the raw events of the past into a narrative that suits the present. Perhaps you took the wrong job offer, chose the wrong co-founder, or raised wrong. Years later, lest you judge yourself harshly perhaps you could revisit a chronicle of the information available at the time of decision making.
Contemporaneous accounts is how historians roll. A take on the Soviet economy in 1980 is germane to a historian, because the writer could not have known about the eventual collapse. Much less useful is the grand New York Times editorial in January 1992 after Mikhail Gorbachev handed over the nuclear codes to Boris Yeltsin. With the benefit of hindsight there is always the temptation of reimagining stray data points as goal seeking agents, colluding and conniving with great sagacity to enable a known outcome.
In summary, the story we tell ourselves, of our careers, of how we came to be requires a bit of journaling, a bit of permanence. Thought is fleeting, conversation — more so.
#5 Write to generate feature lists and business models
Metaphors are integral to natural language and to thought itself — we make sense of the unfamiliar by interpreting it as an analogue of the familiar.
A metaphor describes an idea in one area of human inquiry in terms of the elements of another. Turns out that’s often what we do at work. “Uber for X” or “AirBnB for X” is the banal version of the user of metaphor as an idea generation device. But the Windows Desktop was once based on the metaphor of an actual desktop, something I found bewildering, having come of age well after the PC revolution. Like all great ideas, it was obvious in retrospect.
Consider an aggregation business for pet care. Uber for dogs and cats.
Straightforward. Uber is the OG aggregator. Uber for pets would…aggregate.
But pets is a big space — there are high-skilled services such as all the veterinary stuff, grooming, training, and the relatively low skilled ones, such as dog walking. There are also service lines that require built capacity, such as pet hotels. The business in question will be an aggregation layer bringing some order into this rather fragmented market.
But the Uber metaphor limits us. Some aspects of the business are unlike Uber.
The driver is fungible. The task is to go from A to B. The skill differs in degree but not kind. Pet owners, however, often seek out vets who specialise in small breeds, or large breeds. And they appreciate the personal connection forged when the vet is raising a similar breed at home. It isn’t a mere transaction. It’s human to seek out that warm fuzzy feeling. There are aspects of match-making here, and the dating app metaphor might be considered.
Then there are pet hotels. Pet hotels can be standardised. But they can also be quirky. By that I mean cat furniture. By that I mean maybe the owner is a cat whisperer. Enter the AirBnB metaphor. But then AirBnB metaphor would not be entirely accurate because…well, the pets have to be looked after like children. With AirBnB one is charmed by decor with character. But here it is a combination of day care and full-service hotel. At the time of product discovery, one must choose metaphors carefully.
Finding the right metaphor can help build right. And wrong metaphor — where elements of the source domain cannot really be projected into the target domain — can cause grief. Envisioning all things cloud computing as an “utility” has wrecked much. The source domain the metaphor comes from — the world of water, piped gas, electricity — doesn’t really translate to software or even vanilla compute and storage capacity. Cloud prices haven’t declined to the marginal cost of production. And, I am reliably told AWS billing complexity can make grown men cry.
A metaphor is not just a word or phrase just sitting there, it influences how decision makers build or buy. Choose carefully.
Thus ends my call to arms. Write. Launch a submersible into your mind. There is a lot there than you know. Maybe even a Nessie.
