Writing is the Most Underrated Skill For Work

“You need to write in order to think well.”

Paul Graham

Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.

Shane Parrish

Whenever people find out that I run a blog, their first response is usually, “Blogs still exist?!”

After all, writing seems like a hopelessly outdated practice especially in the era of TikTok and ChatGPT. Nobody has the patience to read (not to mention write) 1,000-word articles. Writing is slow, tedious, and difficult, and not even appreciated by most people. Furthermore, I work in sales, a profession that’s inherently verbal by nature: I talk to customers, to internal teams, to managers, and sometimes, I talk to myself (more often than I admit).

But even in a job that places so much emphasis on speaking and pitching, writing is still the single biggest lever that helped me to learn new skills, think clearer, and communicate more effectively. In this post, I’ll attempt to share why.

Writing Helps Me To Learn

When I first started my job, I was hopelessly overwhelmed. All of a sudden, I had to learn new and more complex concepts than I’d ever faced before. Sure, there were onboarding programs and training courses, but I struggled to internalise everything I learned. Whenever customers asked me a question, I’d find myself turning red while struggling to remember that one esoteric concept that I learnt the week before. I was hopelessly in over my head.

So one day, after a particular embarrassing customer meeting in which I uhm-ed and ah-ed my way through, I decided that I somehow needed a way to get a better grip on this stuff. I had to teach myself the material in a way that would make sense to me. So I opened a Google Doc, titled it “How To Become A Better Industry Manager”, and started explaining stuff to myself in it. I added links to other resources and helpful diagrams. Instead of having 100 bookmarks, I would have a single guide which I could return to when I needed.

As it turns out, this isn’t a new approach at all. Its modelled after classic learning strategy called the Feynman Technique. Its named after Richard Feynman, a brilliant physicist who was able to explain complex topics in simple terms. In the Feynman Technique, you simply take a blank sheet of paper, write the name of the concept at the top, and then explain it in your own words to a 12-year old. Forcing yourself to articulate things in simple language exposes whether or not you truly understand a concept, or whether you’re just hiding behind jargon.

Writing this guide to myself also helped me to create a mental scaffolding which I could hang other types of concepts on. In my Google doc, I created section headers around the big “buckets” of my job like products, strategy, relationship-building, strategy, etc. This helped me to organise all the disparate ideas I was learning into big mental folders. Whenever I picked up a new concept, I could simply file it under that particular “folder” and see how it fit in with the other related ideas.

Writing this guide was a turning point in my learning. Within 2 months of writing it, I reached a point when I could finally say, “Okay, I think I sorta know what’s going on now”. Ironically, once I hit that point, I didn’t have to return to that guide much. Because the act of writing stuff down in my own words and organising it helped me to internalise those concepts.

Writing Helps Me To Think

The act of writing is an act of seeking clarity: ideas become nakedly good or bad the instant they hit the page. The essay doesn’t lie.

Cedric Chin, Commoncog

I’m in the middle of a book called Working Backwards, which describes the inner workings of Amazon (the company, not the rainforest). In Chapter 4 of the book, the authors described how Amazon famously doesn’t use slides in their meetings. Instead, they structure all important proposals into a 6-page document. Why? Because they believe that writing forces clarity of thinking.

It’s hard to hide a bad argument behind a narrative structure. Once I write something down, it often becomes immediately, painfully clear whether I had thought through it well enough. Often, something that seemed like a good idea in my head suddenly looks dumb after I’ve written it down. This has happened often enough that I’ve started to write one-page memos to myself before starting on any large, complex projects.

Writing also forces me to distill what my core argument is. Have you seen those slide decks which have 20 supporting data points? To me, this is lazy thinking: having 20 supporting slides usually means that the presenter doesn’t have a strong point of view – they’re just throwing a bunch of things against the wall and seeing what sticks.

On the other hand, writing a one-pager forces you to distill down the core ideas and discard the peripheral ones. (A great example is this blogpost – the first draft of this post had 4,333 words, but I’ve cut it down to 1,506 words!)

Writing Helps Me To Communicate

The most undervalued skill of our time is the ability to write. In an analog world, talking was the main currency of communication and connection. In a digital world, there’s a growing premium on the capacity to convey thoughts in text. The pen is mightier than the spoken word.

Adam Grant

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You spent weeks preparing for a big presentation with your Director. You’ve structured your argument, laboured over a beautiful 30-slide deck, and painstakingly practiced your delivery. The big day arrives and you begin your presentation. Midway through slide 3, your Director asks you a question about a data point. The presentation gets derailed. You spend the next 45 minutes going down a rabbit hole, and the meeting ends with no conclusion.

The above scenario plays out in thousands of meeting rooms every day. As this post from Reforge points out, decks might be great to show what you already know, but often aren’t the best vehicle to ask for a decision. Why? Because when arguments are delivered sequentially without context, your audience can’t see the full picture. Instead, I’ve found that whenever I’ve had to communicate a particularly complex topic, writing it out into a 2-pager is way more effective. Having people read through my entire argument helps to put my logic in context, thereby addressing many objections upfront.

One additional benefit of a document is that it helps you to show your work. A narrative not only communicates your rationale, but it also demonstrates your thought process. That means that you don’t have to re-explain your rationale when you’re chatting with people – you can simply point people to your doc. And finally, when it comes to performance reviews, these documents help you to differentiate yourself by demonstrating your clarity of thought.

Two Quick Objections

All of this sounds great, but here are two objections that most folks might have about writing (and their counterarguments):

Writing takes too much time: Yes, this is true. Writing a well-thought out memo takes more time than simply dashing out a quick email or scheduling a chat. But I’ve found that this time investment often pays off dividends down the road. Taking the time to really think through a proposal prevents you from chasing down bad ideas later. In addition, writing can sometimes be faster than creating a slide deck, since you don’t need to deal with pesky graphics or design. Lastly, as I mentioned above, it serves as a record to your thought process, so you don’t have to keep re-explaining your context or rationale to others.

People don’t like reading anymore: There’s also a chance that people won’t actually read the stuff you write. The sad reality is that few people these days have enough attention span to read through a 6-page document. (However, the ones who do are usually the ones that get the most benefit, so there’s still value in cultivating the habit of reading) But even if no one reads your work, writing still serves to clarify and sharpen your thinking. I’ve found that once I’d written an argument out, I’m often more equipped to defend it vs simply winging it.

Conclusion

So even at a time when ChatGPT can churn out an entire article or proposal in seconds, writing is now MORE important than ever. It helps you to learn, to think, and to communicate in ways which can’t be replicated by LLMs.

It’s still something that I still need lots of practice in, which is why I continue to write this blog. Even if no one reads it (but hey, you made it this far!), coming up with ideas, wrestling with them, and forcing myself to articulate them into a semi-coherent post is hopefully a step in the right direction.

Note: The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company