I was going to write this as a preface to the essay I'm writing right now but then it got too long. That essay has been made with the same effort as the one previous- without much. It has ideas that haven't been fully formed. With a narrative that is not fully tied together. But I have decided what's better than writing a great essay is writing itself. Just like the gym, the hard part isn't achieving a milestone or personal record- but showing up.

Start-up daddy Paul Graham says that to come up with great start-up ideas is not to directly think about start-up ideas, but to make thinking in a way about start-up ideas second nature. To let it enter into your sub-conscious. With a consistent output of writing, I intend to achieve a similar goal. To frame everything I'm thinking about with the intention of putting forward a case to someone. To make the habit of giving my thoughts the discipline of narrative structure. To interpret the world around me with an ever stronger intellectual foundation. I'm not trying to write good, I'm trying to think good.

It is everything around the creation of the essay that is important to me. Everything that facilitates it. While there is some purpose to this blog in the creation of some form of identity capital- It's not where the true value lies. The purpose is not to be read, but to act as if that were the case. To simulate the narrative discipline needed to weave my thoughts in a coherent structure. The discipline needed to argue a point of view.

By consistently doing so, it serves to build out the intellectual scaffolding of how I see the world. It does not merely let me articulate or remember thoughts, but build on them. To create relationships between them. Without writing, your thoughts come and go. You subject yourself to a sea of information overload and offload. With writing, you intentionally hold onto the few thoughts you deem of value. You tame them. You wait till they settle. You tie them down to existing thoughts. Without writing, your mind's growth is at the mercy of the wind. With it, you take control.

This is why I write. And why you should too.