Crafting Balance
Balancing Input, Asking Questions, and Overcoming Writer's Bloc
“I deal with writer’s block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent — and when you don’t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man. Never try to be the hare. All hail the tortoise.” — Malcolm Gladwell
The week has been pretty dry for writing ideas. But to be honest I have also not given enough time to write something of deep interest. This thought of not writing a post because there is nothing to write about (commonly known as writers block) is something I faced multiple times over the last two years. So I have been trying to think about writing in a big way.
What is writing all about?
It is when you pen down your thoughts and understand how clearly you can think. It is this wonderful way to actually know how much you have understood in comparison to how much you have read or thought you have understood. I might have read a few wonderful articles on mental models. When I go to write an article though about it I end up realising that the knowledge is very limited.
So it is very obvious that to be a great writer you have to be a great thinker and a great reader.
I find the dilemma of quality and quantity to be very interesting. If I want to write high quality posts there has to be enough intake of information. Michael Mauboussin calls it input and output. Any time there is a misbalance between the two he feels out of balance. It really is that simple for me as well. Simply put if I am reading a lot of things but not writing about anything I would feel out of balance and if I was not reading anything but writing then also I would feel out of balance. The way this week has gone is a bit more towards the latter where I felt like I did not read anything which was that interesting which made me write a post out of it.
There is one thing that I do which I want to end up improving on is the fact that my writing is more of an assembly of information that I put forth. What I want to end up doing with my writing is to read and read a lot and try to connect the dots by thinking a lot. I find that the people who do that write the best. For me to achieve this it requires immense amount of reading. Not only reading but also thinking. If you do not think and I mean think deeply about a lot of things you cannot write high quality things. Not only write but you cannot come up with any insight without thinking about all the things that you consume.
I have got this one theory. In life the best intellectual insights come by asking the right questions and trying to find the answers for those questions.
In the field of investing;
If I put one person with a 20 years of experience and a lot of knowledge in front of a person like Mr Radhakishan Damani then the type of questions asked or the amount he would get out of the conversation in comparison to a 20 year old college student who just started off would be very different.
The questions you ask determines the answer you get and that in turn determines the quality of the output.
I find the art of asking questions to be a great differentiator. If I ask dull questions the answer I will end up getting is going to be dull. As people we focus a lot on answers but we should be focusing on asking better questions. I think that one can get the ability through experience and thinking.
Thank you for reading,
Samvit.