why I write
create the life that you want - one word at a time
Note to self:
Would your writing sustain the test of time?
Would you write if no one reads it for 30 years?
What remains when you stop performing?
Writing is such a big part of my life. It has been for quite some time. And now also writing has also become the foundation of my coaching practice. I ask my clients to journal, and I want to be able to show them why it is important, so these are the reasons why I write.
Maybe some of this will become compelling enough for you to start writing, take control, and truly become the author of your life.
My reasons.
I write to integrate my learnings.
Writing is how I process the world. The chaos of learning must find structure in writing.
I write for myself first and foremost - to observe how my logic and my identity shift over time.
It is also a useful exercise to know and be aware of all the things that I believed but no longer believe.
In a way, a piece of writing is a time capsule of identity. It freezes your thoughts in time so that you can observe them from the vantage point of the more mature version of you - your Future Self. That version of you already exists. When you build a relationship with the Future You, rather than keeping it as an abstraction, you become more effective in reality creation.
I write to understand things more deeply.
When you write, the hidden logic of things gets revealed. Your mind is nothing but an entanglement of thoughts. Writing is how you disentangle. You take the disorder, and dissect it thread by thread. And once you have an individual thread in your hands, you can pressure test its logic.
Especially now with AI, writing is no longer a passive one-way process. You now have a perfect and personalized metacognitive partner, but without your distortions - fears, anxieties, hopes and dreams. The machine mirrors your thinking back at you - organizing your patterns into a structure, showing you alternative pathways of thinking, and sometimes, teaching you new mental models that complete your map of reality.
I write to sharpen my thinking.
People ask this question: how do you become good at public speaking? Derek Sivers wrote this best: The best public speaking is simply a lot of private thinking. And what is private thinking? It is you, sitting alone, with a blank piece of paper, bleeding through your fingertips, reflecting on serious questions that already exist in your life.
Why am I here on this planet?
Who am I - really?
What is the nature of my mind? How does this constantly chattering black box really work?
Why do I believe the things I believe?
What do I want to believe?
These reflections become the thoughts ordinary people call “deep”. There is nothing deep about it. Immerse yourself in the depths of you long enough, and this level becomes your new normal. This is not deep. It is just that most people habitually swim in shallow waters.
Engage in deep thinking long enough, and eventually you will have to face the fact that everything you have believed in your life for a very long time must collapse. The mind doesn’t want that. The mind avoids self-destruction. The self-destruction of the mind is where the path to freedom lies. Each thought that has been polished through countless written iterations becomes a step towards that freedom.
And yes, the world does not want you to be free. The world of men is a system. All things in life are systems. And you can understand the system - how it works and how to operate mindfully within it, or you can be a mindless cog in it, completely unaware of the mechanism that keeps you trapped.
Example: Social media. Social media is a system that does not incentivize truth. It incentivizes attention-seeking behaviour. To be serious is to stay away from that social media dumpster-fire. To be serious is to explore what is underneath the game you are so used to playing. That’s why I wrote the question I wrote: What remains when you stop performing?
What remains is the essence. No one to lie to. No one to deceive. The naked truth. That Truth becomes the foundation for everything else. From that truth, you can build your life.
Respect long form. Respect substance. Respect the entity that you become when the need to perform is no longer there. The truest, the most authentic version of you is also the one that is the most dangerous when it comes to reality creation.
I write for the reader.
No writer writes with no reader in mind. Otherwise, why publish? I write with the hope that my writing will help someone out there. The primary purpose? To collapse the timeline to understanding.
Time is our most valuable resource. Time spent in ignorance is time wasted. I wasted a lot of time in life. I know it with absolute certainty, I am still paying with the chunk of my life for the things I do not yet understand - hence the hunger behind the question: What else is out there that I don’t know?
It is important to realize this, too: Ignorance is not only not knowing something. It is a blind belief in the verity of the things that are simply not true.
Ultimate truth exists.
Not your truth or my truth. But THE Truth - the essence of life and natural laws of this reality that are universal for all living beings, for human beings specifically. It takes some time to learn those laws - a lot of those lessons come through knowledge accumulation. Yet some of these most vital lessons come from knowledge demolition - unlearning the beliefs you learned that are not true, unconditioning yourself from the toxic influence of this world.
This is the purpose of writing - writing is thinking deeply about the things that truly matter. Deriving through the prism of your own complex human predicament, the fundamental math of life - getting down to its essential elements. Why is that important?
Just like in math, once you have zeros and ones, once you have your basic operators like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, you can derive formulas so sophisticated they send rockets to space. The same is true for the equations of life. If you know how to manipulate words, you can send your rocket to space - you can construct your reality. Reality is nothing but perception. Perception is stories. Stories are words. Simple.
You know what we all have in common? It is the ultimate driver of all human behaviour - we all want to be as proficient as we can in constructing our reality. Our main incentives are two: to minimize pain and to maximize pleasure.
Buddha derived this fundamental math of life thousands of years ago. And so he wrote:
Life is suffering.
Being in this physical shell of a body and this psychological shell of a mind creates suffering. To be human is to suffer - such are the rules of engagement - the price of admission into this rollercoaster of a human life. Embarking on a quest to understand the nature of your suffering will inevitably bring you to the question: Who is suffering? Remain on the path of this honest inquiry, and it will lead to wonderful revelations. Persist long enough, and it will eventually teach you how to suffer less.
Pain is inevitable. How much pain you will experience in your life is a function of your understanding. Or lack of it.
I write for mental hygiene.
Most people misuse their minds. They use it to store information. The computer analogy I always give: think of the difference between RAM and HDD. What happens when you use your RAM as the hard drive? Open 1 million Google Chrome tabs, and you’ll find out soon enough. This sounds ridiculous to use our machines like that, but this is exactly how most people utilize their brain-computer - a million tabs open.
This cognitive overload is what creates internal friction. Thousands of mental processes running at the same time - this is the most energy draining exercise a human mind can deploy. Writing eliminates that.
Writing is the container for thoughts - you dump them so that they stop occupying your mind. It is a form of mental hygiene. If you don’t throw out garbage from your house for a week, your home will smell. Why don’t people clean and declutter the only home they will ever have - their mind - with the same discipline, is a mystery of life. If you don’t weed out the garden in which you rest, how well will you rest?
Some people write to remember. I write to forget. The machine can take care of my memories. It is designed for that purpose - to store information. The mind is designed to generate thought, synthesize thought, and organize thought. Misusing the mind is what leads to suffering.
I write for pleasure.
I believe that the highest pleasure accessible to mankind is the pleasure of engaging in deep thought. The more you deep-think, the higher the quality of your thoughts, the higher the quality of your life. It is that simple.
Think of solace for a second. Our consolations in life are a function of our taste.
You cannot satisfy a sophisticated man with the pleasures of the unsophisticated one. I would argue that the man who finds consolation in cheap beer, KFC nuggets, and a baseball game on telly Saturday night is not the same man who spends most of his waking time thinking about how to change the world via building his business. The latter finds his dopamine in the life of focus. The former is more prone to fall victim to the worldly distractions, which, if you look around out there, are plenty.
Pain is inevitable. And if pain is a must, only the form of pain is a choice.
Pain that comes from the life of focus. Or pain that comes from an unfocused life.
Pick your poison.
I write for the inner experience.
What is the nature of your Experience? A big part of what you call my experience is simply your thoughts.
Direct implication?
Think good thoughts = have a good time.
Think bad thoughts = create your own misery.
The more you write, the more aware you will become of this.
The more aware you become, the more wild it becomes for you to recognize how many people live unaware of this simple but fundamental truth.
This is what they mean when they say: “You are the creator of your reality.” There is no such thing as Ultimate Reality. I mean, there are things that indicate that there is, but it's not something that we humans can directly experience.
8 billion people - 8 billion perceptions - 8 billion individual realities being experienced. You are the prisoner of your own cranium. Your life is yours to live. Your mind is yours to inhabit. It is up to you if you make it a prison or a cozy home, or an absolutely impenetrable fortress to dwell in.
I write for control and precision of communication.
Communication is how we shape this world: we say words to each other, by which we create mutual understanding. Through that mutual understanding, we create agreement, alignment, and action. As a result, shit happens. From that shit we all create - we extract new understanding, new alignment, new words. We proceed with creating the next new shit. It’s a cycle.
The first principle here is simple: The better you are with words, the better you are at creating reality and aligning and orchestrating humans. Your money, your career, your material success, all the goodies of this world you want to attain and acquire in your lifetime, are all functions of that ability to communicate.
External communication is a manifestation of internal communication.
Internal communication is nothing but your thoughts.
Communication skills, hence, are nothing but thinking skills.
You get those right, and the world is your oyster.
I write to shape my Identity - my Concept of Self.
Identity is a story. The person you believe yourself to be is simply an entanglement of beliefs. Every belief is a thought repeated so many times that it becomes a deeply integrated program in your subconscious mind.
Every conflict is a self-conflict. You do not have relationships with other people. You never really know those so-called “others”. All you have are the concepts of those “other people” inside your mind, created through your perception of them. That which you call a “relationship” is the relationship between your concept of self and your concepts of others. All relationships are in your head.
When these stories, notions, and conceptions conflict, you experience inner conflict. When all stories live in high coherence, there is no inner conflict, and so there is no internal friction. The mind that is not wasting energy on internal friction is the mind that can channel this energy into the process of reality creation (aka focusing on the things that truly matter). Thus, inner peace is a precursor to the desired-by-so-many world-class performance.
Writing is the process of disentangling your internal narratives; it is the process of creating inner coherence and alignment, structure and inner organization. The more you write, the less conflicted you will become, the more peaceful you will become, and by extension, better at performing - whatever performance means to you in your life - career, business, art, craft, relationships, etc., etc.
I write to externalize inner force.
You heard this expression before: Name it to tame it. Why? What remains unarticulated cannot serve as leverage. Leverage can only exist when it is concrete - when it has physical shape and form. The word is physical. What is written can be refined, challenged, transferred, or used. That which exists only in the realm of the vague is nothing but a mental fog. That which becomes an object can be manipulated and put to good use.
I write to slow the Life down.
Life is fast. If your reality is anything like mine (oversaturated with constant screen time and rapid context switching), it feels like Life moves even faster. Weeks collapse into what feels like Groundhog Day on repeat.
Things happen - unforeseen events, tumultuous emotions, insights, new life lessons - a modern tech-adjacent human has a lot to process. Without writing, the experience of life rushes through consciousness unexamined. With writing, you gain the ability to stretch the time.
Socrates wrote: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Agreed. And it seems that it is the very process of examination, dissection, and introspection that makes life more worthy, more intentional, more conscious. I attest - it definitely does for me.
We forgot how to slow down. We want things to happen faster, harder, more intensely. Where are we running? And why are we rushing? This life will be over before we know it. Writing is a good reminder of that.
I write to pressure-test my private truth.
Private truth might not be the end Truth. It is the fallacy of the human mind to fall and dwell in the belief that everything you know is true, and your way of living is the only legitimate and correct one. That is nonsense by definition. 8 billion insects cannot be right at the same time.
We must trust what we feel. But how do we know that what we feel is right?
What is intuition? In some sense, intuition is pre-linguistic pattern recognition - you feel that something is true before you can articulate it. But feeling that something is true doesn’t make it true. “Feeling right” is not the same as “having clarity”. Most people confuse these two.
Thoughts and beliefs can become trustworthy - but only if they survive the clarity of writing. Writing is that conversion mechanism - you take your felt sense and transform it into the structure of language. The structure then becomes something you can pressure-test. If it breaks, it is not robust enough.
I write to preserve the signal.
Insights come and go. Your Identity is constantly changing and flowing. Your life conditions change - when they do, your incentives may shift too. Incentives are what drive your behaviour.
Things change constantly.
A lot in life is just entropy. Apart from you alone, 8 billion people out there are doing some random shit, creating things, building things, doing their life stuff - that creates a lot of randomness in your life. You don’t know if you’d get poisoned by something you ate during your vacation in the Caribbean and die because someone made a mistake in the kitchen, or your plane doesn’t land, or your horrible bosses decide to make some cuts to improve the bottom line. You don’t know.
Markets shift. Language evolves. The rules of the game get rewritten daily. In many ways, your life itself is an ongoing process of resisting entropy. Even biologically, the pattern is the same. Death is the moment when your body can no longer resist it.
Writing is a tool to do that - to resist entropy - it creates continuity between the moments of life, ideas and thoughts, your fragmented identities, your unformulated values. Your memory will fail you. Writing will not.
I want to be able to come back to my Substack notes 30 years later and see how my mind has evolved. The goal is to hopefully cringe less with time. And, ideally, to leave some breadcrumbs on this path for others to walk as they assemble their own individual maps of reality.
I write to metabolize experience.
Theoretically, you get wiser with age. Also, this is not guaranteed. Life experience does not get automatically converted into wisdom. If life remains unprocessed, it creates a “mental backlog” - a phantom psychological residue - emotional charge, negativity, lessons unlearned, half-formed conclusions about life. Accumulate it long enough, and it becomes Noise. Noise is what clouds judgment. That which people call “emotional baggage” is exactly that - life experience unmetabolized.
Consider writing your digestive system. You can take your Life and break it down to atomic elements - what happened, why it happened, what was your interpretation, why it matters to you, what is the illusion and what is the distortion, what can you learn here, and how to move on with your life being better, improved, upgraded. Digest the experience, and it will become your new life strategy, or deep insight, or maybe just simply a cathartic release.
Writing is your workspace. It is a layer between thought and physical reality - a space in which you can run simulations of what can be and study the consequences of your actions without paying the full price. Lived reality is expensive. Writing is a low-cost environment where you can run your wild experiments on your identity, life strategy, and truth without the fear of inflicting damage on your precious Self.
I write to operate from principle, not states.
Thought creates emotion. Emotion drives behaviour. Humans are designed this way - we take action, being driven by our emotional state, then the rational mind intellectualizes and justifies the decision to act. When we are stressed, we are more prone to make dumb decisions. When we are calm after the storm, we question our intelligence.
Mood fluctuates. For a lot of people somewhere in the world right now, life is a constant emotional turmoil. Writing is the stabilizing layer.
Your decisions do not have to depend on how you feel. They can be grounded in principles.
The beauty of having your guiding principles written is that they can be refined over time through iterations. The more integrated they are, the steadier you will be. Life conditions, circumstances will change - the behaviour will hold steady when you need it steady. From this angle, writing becomes a self-governance mechanism.
I write to compound asymmetric advantage.
Most people exist in a reactive loop. Overstimulated, overcaffeinated, overworked on the jobs they hate, exhausted and underslept, they consume the shit-shower of social media, absorbing opinions like opioids, absorbing the self-sabotaging language, toxic mental models, and low vibrations from the external world. Even when a person is intelligent their thinking is usually a downstream of someone else’s thinking. Their cognition is busy, rarely generative.
Writing is the opportunity to claim your power back. You stop being a consumer and become a creator - first and foremost, a creator of your own life.
To write is to think deeply - what are the words that you are using on a daily to describe yourself and the world? How did these words appear? What is your relationship with those words? To write is to decide what your words mean. To write well is to exact precision on your life. In our day and age, it also means to be ethical. In a world that is drowning in noise, it takes integrity and courage to not be vague with your words. To live, refusing to harm people with your vagueness.
Do this long enough, and this compounds.
You write. You continue to write. Your clarity of thinking grows. You become principled. You act with intention and precision. You move through the world with intention. You become harder to manipulate. The noise of the world loses its power. Virtue signalling no longer makes sense to you. You start producing a clean signal, and you refuse to settle for mediocrity and compromise on quality. Your intellectual leverage accumulates.
The external reality follows. Your audience is there. At first, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they try to cancel you, eventually, they begin to take notes. “Overnight success” is the term they invented for something that has been emerging quietly for years.
Naval writes: The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. Everything you have created for yourself with the power of your mind - your money, your career, your relationships, your body, your peace of mind, all your life results - is a function of your intelligence. To write is to sharpen your intelligence - it is to take full control, full responsibility over your reality, to live a life of focus, self-reliance, and discipline. To write is to compound asymmetry.
This path is open to anyone.
Few have what it takes to walk it.
A final compression
I don’t write to express. I don’t write to impress.
I write to construct a mind capable of truth, coherence, and leverage.
If that helps someone out there, so be it.
Love that you broke this down. My brain gets so cluttered with impressions that writing is how I mentally tidy things up.