The Engine of Synthesis: How Writing Makes You a Better Thinker

There's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

In his recent essay, Write & Write-Nots, Paul Graham poses the question (paraphrased):

“Is it so bad that people will write less and less as AI can simply do it for them? Isn’t it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren’t many blacksmiths left, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem.”

To which he answers:

“Yes, it’s bad. The reason is… writing is thinking. In fact, there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.”

If you’re engaged in any sort of consistent writing practice, you know this to be true. Writing is the antidote to fuzzy thinking, vagueness, confusion, fragmentation and incoherence.

It’s why Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint presentations and required six-page written memos for meetings at Amazon, saying, “There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

Joan Didion who said “I don’t know what I think until I try to write it down.”

Or Wittgenstein emphasising the importance of synthesis: "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long."

Writing is thinking. And it’s more important than ever in a world where our minds are so active, so filled with information, ideas, concepts and thoughts that we haven’t externalized and processed.

In this essay, we’re going to look at why writing makes you a better thinker, and how you can develop your own writing practice to actively compound your own thinking.

Writing as a Metacognitive Loop

"Writing requires you to totally immerse yourself in the thinking and rethinking process." —Steven Mintz

As you write, you’re not just putting words on the page. You’re not simply storing thoughts. You are actively synthesizing and structuring what’s going on in your head. You’re running through a metacognitive loop that involves externalization, observation/analysis, and integration/incubation.

1. Externalize. The process of writing and thinking. You can't write words on the page without thinking, and you can't truly think in externalized fashion without writing (well, except for conversation and dictation—but we'll look at why this is not the same shortly).

2. Observe & Analyze. As you write and externalize, you automatically start thinking about your thinking. The words on the page reflect back to you in a way that doesn't happen when thoughts sit in your mind.

3. Integrate and Incubate. Your externalized thoughts feed back into your mind, extending, enhancing, updating or replacing the prior non-externalized thoughts. This modifies the incubation process, where your subconscious goes to work on your updated mental models and ideas.

These are not completely distinct and isolated steps. There’s a huge amount of overlap in the sense that integration & incubation is happening on micro time scales as you write, but also after you’ve finished writing and go about your day.

As with all models, it is a poor representation of what actually happens in reality, but it’s useful to conceptualise anyway.

A note on the inefficiency of writing

Writing can often feel inefficient. This is likely why people avoid writing—at least consistently—or jump to using AI tools as a replacement rather than an enhancement. Why engage in the slow, difficult, frustrating process of writing when you can just get a computer to do the heavy lifting? Why write 2,000 words when you can write a 50-word prompt and get 2,000 words back in an instant?

Well, it’s only inefficient if your goal is speed. Which it shouldn’t be. Because we’re talking about how to think better.

Taking unformed, unstructured, fragmented ideas and concepts in your head and synthesizing them into something clearer and better is not an easy thing to do. It’s not a factory-like process where efficiency is the aim. You want effectiveness. Not just speed to results, but speed to desired results.

Back to the Amazon example: Bezos says that writing six-page memos can take weeks. Is that efficient? Not if the goal is speed. But if you want better thinking—and better results—it might be the fastest path to them.

When you’re writing to think and learn, there’s a level of inefficiency that must not only be tolerated but embraced, because in that inefficiency lies mental growth.

The Medium Matters

While you can externalize the internal through various mediums—like conversation or dictation—writing is unique in that it:

• Forces complete thoughts. It requires explicitness and precision. You can’t fill in the gaps with gesture, tone, or body language.

• Creates a “distance” between thought and expression that enables a unique type of mental reflection.

• Makes implicit connections explicit, giving them scaffolding and structure.

• Works with the visio-spatial system in a way that other forms of externalization don’t. (source: trust me bro)

It’s not that you shouldn’t use other methods of externalization. Conversation or dictation are useful. But you shouldn’t avoid writing and pursue other mediums just because they feel more natural to you.

Going a layer deeper: there’s a difference between typing and writing longhand. There are benefits to both practices, and if you want to think better, you should use both.

Typing is more efficient. There’s less friction between thought and its externalization. I find that for exploratory writing, it can be a lot better because I'm not bottlenecked by speed, so I can go down different paths and write about various topics and let my mind sort of "run free" in a way that I wouldn't be as inclined to do if writing by longhand.

But conversely, the friction involved in writing by hand has its own benefits. It forces you to slow down, to think in more precise terms. There's something more tactile about it. Words have more value because they require more effort, so you tend to not write as much filler nonsense.

In fact, some authors swear by doing this. Robert Caro wrote all his books by hand. As have others.

Again, I think you should do both, but it's up to you. Experiment. Try taking all your notes by hand, but then typing the final work. Or vice versa, type up all your notes but write the first draft by hand.

In general, I try to find ways to use pen and paper more and more, because I already spend too much time at my computer.

Writing as exploration and evolution

Not only is writing a way to structure the fragmented thoughts in your head, it's also a way to explore and come across new insights.

If you're not sure where to start with something, then one of the best things you can do is just start writing, as awkward as it might feel. Once you start writing, you trigger the metacognitive loop and it can take you down paths you wouldn't have gone down were you just in your own head.

Just like if you were having a conversation with a friend about a topic, you would go on tangents and explore multiple ideas, writing is similar. It's a conversation with yourself, externalized.

With writing, just as thinking, what you start with isn't necessarily what you end with. I can't tell you how many times I've started journalling about something going on in my life, only for it to turn into an entire essay on a topic that evolved from a single personal reflection. Or the times I've been taking notes on a book and it's sparked an idea for a video distantly related, which I feel an urge to write about.

You want to embrace this exploration and evolution as much as you can, because it's what leads to great insights. It's the "creative" part of thinking that you mustn't ignore. And you can apply it in your work too. Perhaps you're writing a strategy doc for your marketing efforts over the next 90 days, and it sparks an idea for a product. Well, go write about it. You can always come back to the marketing strategy.

Note: there is something to be said about focus and bringing yourself back to the topic at hand. This is also an important skill, because otherwise your writing scope can expand so much and you end up with a lot of noise and little signal. However, this is a secondary problem and should only be addressed once you've developed a consistent writing habit (in my opinion).

Writing Practices

As with anything, writing is a skill that compounds in correlation to how habitual it is. If all you do is write an essay once a year, you'll get some benefit, but not much.

You want to turn this into a regular habit. Daily if possible. That doesn't mean you need to be writing for hours every day—nor is that feasible for most people. But you want to be in the practice of externalization every day.

So, I'm going to share a few "practices" based on your current writing level and resources.

First, you want to build consistency. This is stage one. If you don't write at all right now in any meaningful or consistent way, then you want to get in the flow of doing so. Not just for consistency's sake, but also because it will help you get many of the benefits we've discussed in this essay.

There are a few approaches you can take here.

The first is Julia Cameron's "morning pages." Three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness writing, ideally done first thing in the morning.

This is probably the best starting point for people. It's demanding enough that it will feel worthwhile (as opposed to just committing to something super easy like: I'll write for a minimum of 5 mins a day), but it's also unstructured outside of its two constraints: three pages and longhand only.

Because it's unstructured, there's less friction and writer's block. You can write whatever the hell you want. As Cameron writes:

There is no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing. I stress that point to reassure the nonwriters working with this book. Writing is simply one of the tools. Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included.

This is the simplest form of externalization there is. There's no need to show your writing to anyone or publish it. It's simply taking the thoughts in your mind and putting them on paper. One day, you might write about the person who cut you off in traffic yesterday and how it's still bugging you. Another day, you might write the first three pages of a fiction book idea you have in mind.

Problem/Decision Writing

One pattern I've noticed is that I tend to overthink and get paralyzed inverse to how often I write. In other words: if I'm writing consistently about the things that are going on in my head, and I'm writing about them in a structured and well articulated manner, then I'm far more likely to cut through all the noise and move towards action and decision.

When you have a decision you need to make, or a problem you need to solve, and you don't externalize it, then it's very easy to have it sit there and become a burden.

A non-writing example of how simple and powerful externalization can be: often with my coaching clients, they kind of know what they need to do, but it's not until they externalize the decision or the problem with someone else—like me as their coach—that it becomes so damn obvious to them that they can't believe they haven't acted earlier. One of my clients a while back was working on a bunch of projects—too many in fact—and he knew that but hadn't externalized it properly, so he kinda just dealt with it. It wasn't until I mirrored back to him the situation that he realized, "Damn, I've gotta focus on only these two things instead."

While I don't think writing is a replacement for a coach, it's certainly useful. When you write out problems you're stuck on, the solutions are more likely to appear. When you think through and write about decisions you're struggling to make, it often becomes obvious what you need to do. And if it's not obvious, well, you've developed a clearer picture of the pros and cons and your subconscious mind will be able to do better work through the process of incubation.

There are a few questions and prompts that really help with this method of writing:

• What is the real problem here?

• What is the problem behind the problem?

• Am I trying to address a symptom or a cause?

• Do I need more clarity and resolution? Or do I already have the solution but I'm afraid to act?

• Is this a problem that actually needs to be solved right now, or are there more pressing things?

• What are the consequences of this not being solved?

• What information do I think I'm missing, and how can I find it?

• Why haven't I made the decision yet? What's the real reason?

• What would it look like if this decision had been made and action had been taken?

A similar approach here is the modified Feynman Technique. Essentially, you:

1. Write down the problem and all you know about it.

2. Identify the gaps and missing information

3. Research/get the information, have the conversations, etc. Refine the writing and problem/solution.

4. Repeat until it's clear and simple.

For example, let's say I have a problem in my business, which is that our revenue has dropped significantly month over month. And I have a reasonable idea of why this is: our lead generation has declined significantly.

So I'd start by writing out the problem and all I know about it, as well as a potential solution:

The problem in our business is fundamentally the decline in leads. We were getting ~200 leads a day a year ago, and now we're doing to ~70 per day. While there might be other reasons for revenue decline, this one seems to be the biggest, most obvious driver.

Why did the leads decline? A lot of it has to do with our search traffic dropping. Again, there might be other factors, but this is the most obvious.

So, how do we get leads back up? There are multiple approaches we could take:

1. Fixing SEO and trying to ramp that back up

2. Running paid campaigns to improve lead generation

3. Other marketing strategies

..

And then I might go away, do a bunch of research and/or looking at the data, and coming back and refining the solution:

Okay, the simplest solution here is to figure out paid acquisition. SEO is a longer-term fix which we can spend some effort on, but it's much less inside our control. We will dedicate... Etc

Note-taking as writing

I'm not going to spend too much time on this, because other people have covered it in depth. Sonke Ahrens with his book How to Take Smart Notes, and a lot of the PKM guys.

What's important to understand is that simply taking notes and copying word-for-word the highlights in books you read is not really a useful form of externalization. This is partly due to the endowment effect—we highlight and get a sense of ownership over words we haven't written, and we think we understand them when really we don't. It's also because there's minimal cognitive processing involved in this type of note-taking. You don't have to think.

That's not to say you shouldn't copy some quotes word-for-word. It should just be one component of your wider note-taking practice.

Prioritize production

When you're reading a book, or an article, or watching a video and something sparks inspiration for you, I think it's best to go and write about it right there and then. Inspiration is fleeting, and if you take the path of laziness and say "Oh, I'll come back to that." Then it's unlikely to happen.

I'm not saying you need to go and write an entire essay, but you should write a few sentences or paragraphs about whatever comes to mind. You want to store context. Writing a couple words in the margin of the book is often not enough detail.

Concept formation and synthesis

This is really at the heart of writing to force thinking. It's the gold standard of structured thought.

You're taking disparate, fragmented ideas and thoughts and putting them into a structured piece of content, like an essay. It doesn't matter whether you publish the essay or whether anyone else reads it—though you should write it as if other people will read it because it forces you to be concise and clear.

There's absolutely a difference between free-form writing like morning pages and this type of writing.

When you write an essay, or you really work hard to structure thought, there are multiple things you have to do.

You need to really think through what you're going to say. This happens both before and during the process of writing. Something starts as an idea in your head, perhaps you start writing down some notes about it, those notes trigger new thoughts and new notes and so on.

You need to outline and structure the topic(s). While you might engage in freeform, exploratory writing as part of the process, to think and write clearly, you need some sort of logical structure and flow. Being able to structure ideas and break them down in a way that makes sense and flows well is a sign of good thinking. Again, it doesn't matter whether you're writing for an audience or just yourself—the practice of structure is useful.

You need to write. It will be messy at first. But you'll slowly start to develop your ideas and carve out the sculpture.

And you need to edit, and refine. As I mentioned, this itself is a form of thinking. You're cutting the useful from the non-useful. You're making things clear and succinct. You're improving flow. You're reducing confusion and vagueness. It's in this editing process that your thinking really starts to get clear, because you're cutting away the stuff that's messy or doesn't deserve to be there.

Essentially, through this process of writing an essay, you move from a primordial idea, or set of ideas, that are often vague and messy, into a crystallized, dense structure that acts as a "proof of work" for your thinking.

Action step

I have some homework for you. A writing assignment.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this video, and you’re convinced that you need to write more, then I want you to externalise this.

Write a page or two on how a writing practice will help you in your life, business, career. Write about the ways in which it would help you improve your thinking. Be specific. Write about how you could use writing to think through problems and decisions you’re facing right now.

Just get it all out there. Write as if you’re the strategist of your own life—because you are. Write as an external observer if it’s easier.

But just write. And do it again and again.