Why Bother Writing?

At the beginning of this summer, I told myself and my 3 readers (Hi, y’all! 👋) that I’d publish something every week. I have not achieved that. Not even close.

Screw it. That was an overly ambitious goal. I’m not experienced enough to write anything worth publishing at that clip, and I’m not enough of a shoot-from-the-hip kinda guy to just spray half-assed ideas into the ether. But I don’t feel bad about trying, as at least having the goal in mind has kept me on the habit of writing, and that is really what matters to me. It was enough to break me out of the perfectionist rut that high-conscientiousness folks often fall into. Just the idea that I must publish kept me on track.

But, boy did I have to wrestle with myself. I got caught up trying to cram a significant chunk of my thoughts on how society, business, and organizations work in my last piece No Clanker Ever Called Me a Resource. That one took a loooooong time to get out there. And while I’m proud of what I wrote, at nearly ten thousand words, it’s a discursive, meandering rant that is unlikely to resonate with any audience because it’s too hard to read and the points it makes are not super clear.

And I think I’m okay with that. That piece was a product of years worth of thinking and months worth of trying to organize my thoughts enough to get them onto a page. It felt good to get it out, even if I know it’s not up to snuff. In some sense, I needed to write that piece for my own sanity. Those thoughts stay cooped up in my head, and they come out awkwardly in regular conversations, because I don’t have the discipline to serialize the arguments into human language.

When you have a lot of thoughts on a subject, but you never really articulate them, you can develop a kinda weird pride. No one can ever tell you you’re wrong if you never tell them what you think, right? So internally, you remain convinced of your own correctness, holding on so dearly to that conviction that it becomes too scary to ever present your arguments, because the arguments you make might not be as convincing as you hope. There’s a lot on the line for your ego. It’s a huge psychological wall you construct in your own mind.

And I broke through it! The result is deeply imperfect and below the standards I’d like to hold myself to one of these days, but given the actual amount of practice I’ve put into this, I’m decently happy. People have read it and parts have resonated with them. My voice comes through. I think my perspective, while not totally unique, would be fresh to many folks who haven’t been immersed in the kinds of writing I’ve been soaking in for the past years. So at that level, I am pleased.

Are there ways I can improve? Sure! I don’t think my writing is something I’m eager to try and post around the internet the hopes of drumming up traffic or attention. Not just yet anyways. For that, I need to learn to cut, cut, cut far more ruthlessly. Concision and focus are important for making a big splash in a large pool. Or if I do really want to write long-form, I need more concrete material. More stories. More detail. More data. If I want to go long, I need to go deep too.

That’s not to say I’m not happy. But I’m not done. Someone close to me suggested the kinds of improvements I want to achieve are only important if I want to “go viral.” I’m not sure that’s true. There’s lots of reasons to want to write better that have little do with seeking a large general audience. And frankly I’d be a bit nervous if something I wrote blew up. Once something gets real big, it’s not even yours anymore. It becomes part of The Discourse, and I don’t think I’m ready to play that particular game just yet.

Moreover, this kind of reflection has made me ask once again: why am I writing? Am I just doing it for my own personal gratification, like I’m scratching some kind of itch? Am I trying to gain an audience? Do I want to go viral? Do I want to build a brand for myself? If so, what does that brand look like? What is the brand story? Does talking about brands still make me feel a bit queasy?¹ Or is this just a creative outlet for me, a chance to blow of some steam and channel my muse to something less restrictive than parenting or business?

The honest answer is: a bit of all of that. Except maybe going viral. Not trying, not ready. But the rest of it fits pretty well. I’m not actively trying to develop a well-defined brand image as a marketeer might, but I am trying to develop a consistent voice and express my ideas, some of which are pretty idiosyncratic. There’s inherent branding in doing that.

But first and foremost, I’m doing this for me. The rest of those goals follow from that. I’m doing this because I have long needed to write down my thoughts. I spend a lot of time thinking. I enjoy it. Whenever I get a true moment of downtime, with no pressing duties and no one around to bother me (rare these days), my mind starts to wander to one of a multitude of topics I’ve been unknowingly deferring to my “think about later” queue. And I’ll chew threw it in my head while pacing around the house and making odd faces and gestures. It’s part of my process. I know it’s weird; I’ve been told so many times. It’s why I prefer to do it alone.

As much as I like to think, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not particularly good at expressing those thoughts when pressed. When I need to write text or speeches, I feel my mind flood with ideas trying to get out, like a full sink backed up by a clogged drain. I want to make a thousand points at once, and I have no idea how to cut or distill that down to something simpler. It’s not something I practice enough. And I have no body of work to refer to when a point I’m trying to make demands deeper explanation than the medium allows. It’s like there’s a backlog of writing in my head that is demanding to be recorded, but I don’t have a conduit that can convey all of it at once.

I feel silly and arrogant even talking like that. Who am I to have so many Great Thoughts that absolutely must be set to text? What will happen if I don’t? Will people even know they are missing out on my incredible insights? Will their minds wither in a psychic drought like crops shriveling over a parched and sunbaked field? Will the damn of my mind burst and spill out all my thoughts at once in an incoherent burst of glossolalia? Will my head just explode? (CW: exploding head)

I don’t mean to be overly dramatic. I’m just trying to situate you in my subjective experience of feeling the inner need to write. I don’t pretend that what I have to say is important in some universal sense. It’s just important to me. There’s a part of me that is unfulfilled because I haven’t put the effort into doing this before. It’s more than an itch I need to scratch; it’s a primal drive I must satisfy.

But I worry, worry, worry that when push comes to shove, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. There’s a bit of imposter syndrome here, and maybe a dash of genuine humility at acknowledging the vast and complex nature of our universe. There’s a also some truth behind that fear. Writing is an extremely important tool for forcing us to clarify our thoughts. Without writing, it’s easy to convince yourself that you understand something much more deeply than you do.² There have been countless times for me, when I believed I understand something well, and I go to explain it or argue for it, and find that I don’t have the words to say what I mean. My idea was not as concrete as my mind had allowed me to believe.

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.

— Leslie Lamport

Our brains are very eager to take shortcuts. We want the satisfaction and conviction that comes from having a well-reasoned belief, without putting in the work. We need forcing functions like writing to ensure that we don’t fall into those traps. There’s nowhere for bad reasoning to hide in text. Critical readers will pick it up quickly. If you yourself are a critical reader, this can be very frustrating, because even a cursory editing pass over your own work will reveal your supposed rock-solid arguments as the flimsy non-sequiturs they are.

Fortunately writing gives us time. So you can do multiple drafts and editing passes and rethink things. You can re-order and cut sections and rework sentences. You can edit for tone and style and diction and voice. It’s genuinely fun, as long as you don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Perhaps this is why having a goal of publishing at some cadence may not be the best. I set that goal originally to force myself to actually publish things—a necessary push, for sure—but if that pressure takes the fun away, then what good is it? I find myself enjoying the challenge of wrestling with my thoughts, and refining my writing until it’s up to my own standards.³ As long as I’m sticking with it and actually publishing at something resembling a regular pace, I’ll be fine.

Much of why I want to write and write well is just because… I want to be a good writer. Simple as that. I don’t feel like I need a reason to want that. Seeking excellence—in a skill, craft, art, product, service, habit, attitude, or whatever—is a laudable end goal in and of itself. It feels weird that I even need to say this, but we often find ourselves in a Good Enough environment, a part of society where Excellence must be justified in reference to some other aim. I’m reminded of a tweet by software engineer and HashiCorp co-founder Mitchel Hashimoto:

Mind boggling to me that I can make a thing faster and there’s always people that ask “but why?” What kind of mentality is that? The pursuit of excellence does not need justification. Also, I find in so many cases, we can’t know the impact of an improvement until we do it.

For example, one I’ve talked about before: Ghostty’s high IO throughput has enabled terminal program (emulator and TUI) fuzzing at a speed thats incomparably fast to prior solutions. This has resulted in upstream patches to resolve issues in popular projects like btop, tmux, and more.

Speed enabled that anecdotally example that lifted the tides of adjacent communities that don’t rely on Ghostty technology at all. I didn’t predict this.

Make things better because they can be better and let the results naturally play out.

The dominant counterarguments to this seem to be centered around notions of working in a “resource-constrained” environment; obviously not everyone has time to make everything excellent—I certainly do not—but I think that’s far too often a cop-out for accepting mediocrity. Moreover, I think people conflate the pursuit of excellence with perfectionism. It’s not. Excellence is found in the balanced alternation of practice and performance. One works to hone a skill; one holds themselves to higher standards; but one acknowledges that one must perform real work, and be subject to potential failure and judgement.

In Hashimoto’s case, if Ghostty were a product that suffered from a lack of regular releases, because he and the contributor team were reluctant to release anything that was less than perfect, then the critics might have a point. But it’s not. The project moves at a decent clip for an open-source project of its type. Maybe some feel that the product could be more full-featured if less time was spent on performance, but that’s just iTerm’s approach.⁴ The world doesn’t need another iTerm.

What’s critical here is someone defining the terms of their own excellence and pursuing those aims with conviction. This necessarily implies releasing the intermediate products of that journey, because you need the feedback from that process to inform the next steps, or because you needed to solve a small problem on your way to solving a bigger one. And sometimes those intermediate products turn out to be useful in and of themselves. Just consider the by-products of the space race. The terms of that project were things like, “beat the Soviets to the moon,” and “explore space because it’s cool and we want to learn about it.” If the goal had been to “incubate useful inventions,” it’s unlikely that much would have come of it.⁵

The mechanism for this is surprisingly simple. Our intuition of what is possible is always bounded by the constraints we believe to exist in the real world. It takes a vivid imagination to see beyond those barriers and a focused endeavor to knock them down. But once knocked down, other people can update their intuition of what’s possible, and find new uses for the capabilities that have been unlocked.

That’s how we get unexpected results. Hashimoto notes that he didn’t predict that Ghostty’s speed would be useful for other communities in any particular way. He just aimed at “competitive performance” and went for it. If that goal had been subordinated to some other aim—say, cranking out specific features that were thought necessary to land a particular customer—then the extra effort to eke out performance would have required justification at every turn. That kind of environment will wear down all but the most stubborn builders. It’s why so many of them eventually seek some form of autonomy for their work.

When you subordinate excellence, you seldom achieve it. When the inevitable trade-offs arise, you will too often sacrifice it in favor of pursuing another goal, or pleasing another stakeholder. There’s nothing wrong with being pragmatic, but pragmatism by its very nature suppresses imagination of what’s possible outside the scope of its primary goals.

Now, my writing is not going to create hyper-performant software, nor will it go to the moon, but seeking to be excellent at it has intrinsic value for me, so I don’t need to justify it. I trust that it will, as a side-effect, have some value for myself and others in different ways. I can’t do it primarily for those side-effects, or I’ll start to constrain myself to some pretty pedestrian goals, and probably suck all the fun out of this process. But the potential for positive side-effects can at least play into my motivation.

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb talks about things that benefit from disorder. We tend to think of disorder and chaos as destructive, so we tend to construct our lives in ways that insulates us from risks. In Taleb’s terms, we tend to seek out robust strategies to protect ourselves from harm. But there are indeed a great many things that benefit tremendously from the unpredictable and stresses the universe throws at them. Adopting these antifragile strategies allows us exposing ourselves to the upsides of these random occurrences.

In society, to expose yourself to random upside, you have to put yourself out there. You need to create something that might resonate with someone. You can do this, say, in public speaking, in writing, or, more recently, in social media content creation. Sure, these things come with risks of being judged, but they also afford you the opportunity to meet people who resonate with what you have to offer. More simply, if expose something you create, there’s a chance people will respond to it in a positive way.

Could people be negative? Absolutely! But there’s honestly so much content out there that it’s far more likely that people will just move on. Writing, in particular, demands enough attention and time that most potential haters won’t even bother reading. The medium itself filters out much of the risk. So for someone who does not yet have a following or reputation, there’s really little downside to publishing something you create. This is liberating. It means you can publish what you actually want too—work that reveals your actual thoughts and personality—without worrying too much about how it can harm you.

I heard a saying once, and despite how dumb it is, I just can’t shake it: your vibe finds your tribe. The people you are meant to associate with will like it when you reveal your true colors. You do not have to conform to any particular expectation. You can say what you want, how you want, when you want. And there are probably people who want to hear it. Some of those people might even reach out, and anyone that reaches out is an opportunity. A potential friend or business partner? Or maybe just a good conversation. It doesn’t matter. You’re meeting people that have already passed several filters that you could never screen for at one of those dreadful networking events: they already find you interesting, they will willingly read a medium-length essay, and they are likely capable of thinking about things for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Now, the unpredictable nature of these payoffs means you can almost never hit them by trying; there’s nothing to aim at! So if you set off in explicit pursuit of things, you will inevitably be discouraged. You need another primary motivation. I don’t expect a million dollar contact to come knocking at my door because of this blog. But it is fun and rewarding, so I do it. Every time I think I suck, I’ll remind myself of that.