Language and writing are the ultimate forms of leverage. Every thought or idea articulated on paper is like a snippet of code available to conjure up and deploy in the future, asymmetrically serving as raw-building blocks of ideation. Writing (and reading) hones critical thinking and helps us spin up richer, more nuanced narratives—the ones we both create and interpret. Narratives, after all, are what make us unique in the animal kingdom. As Yuval Harari shows in “Sapiens,” we are literally storytelling monkeys: language and the ability to form shared, organizing beliefs set us apart from competing hominids and animals around 200,000 years ago. Humanity scaled through language.
Journaling is the means by which we can exercise this fundamental part of ourselves. It can act a reflexive measuring stick for your intellect, a tool to debug your mind, and a space to facilitate emergent insights. Most interestingly, journaling crystallizes otherwise fleeting iterations of yourself from specific moments of time.
Now, writing online scales cheaply and explosively with the ability to passively reach millions of like-minded people. It is the ultimate leverage that, at the same time, compounds the writer’s own narrative muscle.
“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
Terence Mckenna