The Importance of Clear Thinking and Writing
Becoming a clear thinker and writer is hard because the alternative is easy.
Eating a healthy, balanced diet is hard.
Exercising regularly is hard.
But if you don’t eat well, you start to get fat. It’s hard to ignore.
If you don’t exercise, your body quickly becomes flabby, weak, and no fun to look at. It’s hard to ignore.
With thinking and writing, you can exist without overt signs of being slovenly. You can repeat the talking points of your favorite political pundit or spew the stats of your favorite football team. But this isn’t clear, deep thought. It’s mindless memorization.
You might be able to write a text or an email with the right punctuation and grammar and make your point clear. But this isn’t good writing, it’s basic communication.
The path to clear thinking
Thinking clearly means talking through an argument, acknowledging nuance, weighing that nuance in your analysis, and drawing a novel conclusion. It means questioning your first thoughts or the soundbites you heard from the mainstream news.
Thinking clearly means spotting the logical fallacies and rooting them out. It means asking for feedback – even if the feedback makes you uncomfortable - then setting aside your biases, ego, and dogmas to determine the truth.
Good thinking comes from a commitment to stillness. You can’t think clearly if your head is cluttered with the images from your Instagram feed, comments on your Twitter thread, or endless Snapchat stories. Being still means allowing your mind to empty itself of clutter and make room for important thoughts.
Get up early, take walks, exercise your body, put down your phone, turn off the news. Be still and allow yourself to think.
The path to clear writing
Writing clearly means you can walk somebody through a complicated process with simple language. You can explain something that took you weeks, months, or years to learn, in a few concise paragraphs.You don’t use complex language when simple language works. And you treat words like they’re expensive – as if you must pay for each one you put on the page.
Good writing comes from a lot of practice. It comes from writing something shitty, then sitting with it and re-arranging the pieces. Swapping the wrong words for the right words. And, again, seeking uncomfortable feedback.
How the skills converge
The fun thing about this difficult process is watching your improvement in one skill translate to your progress in the other. The more you write, the easier you will find it to think through an argument. This is the product of putting your thoughts on the page, looking at those thoughts and thinking, “that doesn’t make sense. I need to add this sentence,” or “when I try to explain this idea, I see where I’m wrong.”
The process is painful. You’ll feel your identity being challenged. It will make your ego quickly apparent, which is the first step in taming the nasty thing.
Having an ego prevents clear thought. If you tie your identity to an ideology, you can’t be intellectually humble. Without intellectual humility, you won’t consider both sides of an argument, and your thinking will be flawed.
If you’re a Bible thumping right winger, you won’t be able to see the circumstances in which abortion might not be a bad idea. If you’re a left-wing social justice warrior, you’ll have a hard time conceding that maybe all guns aren’t bad.
Rather than aligning yourself with a side, determine yourself with a desire to find the truth. Peter Thiel is a gay, Silicon Valley tech founder who supports President Trump. But, according to Ryan Holiday, Thiel would be the first person to question your logic if you casually toss out Trump rhetoric. Thiel is known as a contrarian, but he’s better defined as a person concerned with finding what’s true.
In his book Conspiracy, Ryan Holiday recently said that Peter Thiel’s brain is in a perpetual Mexican standoff where two competing ideas are competing ruthlessly against each other to figure out what’s true. If we could all achieve this Mexican standoff, our clarity of thinking, quality of interactions, and validity of conclusions would improve.
As you tighten your thinking, writing will become easier. Clear thinking means you know what you want to say, which makes putting coherent words on the page less of a struggle.
Being a better thinker will also make you more curious, which will lead to more ideas and less writers block. The deeper your curiosity, the more you’ll dig into a subject. The more you dig into a subject, the more you’ll realize you don’t know.
Uncovering your ignorance
Think about it like this: You’re interested in bananas, so you read a Wikipedia article on bananas. You think once you read the article,you’ll know everything there is to know about the potassium packed fruit.
But then you look at the sources and see four books and 15 articles on the subject, and instantly, there are 19 other things you don’t know about bananas.
So you pick up The Fish that Ate the Whale, one of the books referenced in the Wikipedia article. While reading the book, you learn about the history of the fruit companies in the United States. You also learn how the banana trade was shaped by the U.S. government’s meddling in the affairs of Central American countries.
Before reading the book, you had no idea how the U.S. was involved in the civil conflicts of Honduras and Guatemala. Now you have research to do on that topic.
And the trend continues ad infinitum. In expanding your knowledge, you also expand your awareness of your ignorance. Expanding your awareness of your ignorance increases your intellectual humility and makes you better able to understand one simple fact: there may be sides to an argument you don’t understand or even know about.
Understanding your ignorance is the beginning of good thinking.
Good thinking and good writing are rare.They are rare because they are hard. They are rare because too many of us are easily fooled – maybe because we haven’t taken the time to develop the skills ourselves.
Pretend your mind is on display the same way your muscles are on display. The future of good ideas depends on it.
