Write to Make Sense

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post about how Charles Darwin cultivated an enormous network of collaborators through letter-writing. That post got passed around a bit, and one of the comments that came up (from a complete stranger!) was that the story reminded her of something she’d heard on a podcast. Quick back and forth with my new pen pal ensued (which was meta!), and I had a chance to catch Jordan Harbinger’s fantastic interview Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Charles Duhigg. Highly recommended.

Interestingly enough, the story that jogged my new friend’s memory sparked something fresh for me. As Duhigg tells it, “Jerry Robbins, the choreographer of West Side Story (and really the designer)… had this contemplative routine of writing letters. He made himself into what's known as an innovation broker by exposing himself to all kinds of different ideas and different types of artistic expressions. And then he would write these long letters to his friends, like 20- or 30-page letters. That act of writing the letter, that wasn't to educate his friends. That was to help him think through what he had seen that day to make sense of the ideas he'd been exposed to.”

It’s probably no surprise that the notion of writing to make sense resonates deeply with me. My daily blog posts aren’t exactly 20-page letters, yet the primary purpose they serve is helping me make sense of the things I’m learning. One of the most valuable things I’ve discovered is the ability to hyperlink. Not for readers, but for me, as it’s been astounding to me how quickly I forget the things that inspired me! In a sense, I’m sending myself down rabbit holes all the time!

I am probably only able to write down ~25% of the various things that inspire me over the course of the week. One might think I’d never forget the “creme de la creme,” the stuff that “made the cut” to being immortalized on a blog. But it’s just not the case.

The daily habit of reflecting, sense-making, and connection forming serves to reinforce the things I’ve forgotten that I wanted to remember! As it turns out, this is another theme Duhigg touched upon in the Harbinger interview. He calls it “disfluency”:

“There's a lot of studies about how people turn information into knowledge… There was a really interesting study that was done a couple of years ago that looked at one group of students who listened to a lecture and they took notes on their laptop. And then another group of students who were told to take notes by longhand. And what's interesting is that the students who take notes by laptop, they tend to record much more information. So because we can type faster than we can write, students who are typing on their laptops tend to take about three times as much information from the lecture. And they tended to copy what the professor was saying verbatim, right? So they could actually transcribe what the professor was saying…

They took all their notes away and they asked them to come back three weeks later. And then three weeks later they gave all of them a test about what they had learned in that interview. And they found that the students who had taken notes by hand, they scored fantastically better on that test. And the reason why is because when you're taking notes by hand, you can't write so quickly. You have to actually listen to what's going on and say to yourself, ‘Okay. I just heard three sentences. Let me summarize that in my own words, let me get at the core idea,’ and by doing so they actually introduce what's known as disfluency to the process of recording information. They force themselves to think about it and that act of thinking encoded that knowledge so much more deeply in their brains. 

But then comes the next question… how do I take that information and make sure that it doesn't exist just for that lecture?… Well, one of the things that we find is the most productive people, they tend to have this kind of check in system.. They have a regular meal once every three weeks with one of their best friends. And at that meal, they do the same thing every time: they talk about what's happened in the last three weeks, the best ideas that they've been exposed to and they describe those ideas... We think of those things as social opportunities, right? That we tell our friends about ideas because we want to educate them. But what's actually happening is that we're educating ourselves. We're remembering the most important idea. We're rephrasing that idea in a way that forces us to make sense of it, to see how it actually interacts with our life and how we can use it.” 

I love that: the very act of writing serves to reinforce learning. Putting things into our own words turns information into knowledge. And sharing has the potential crystallize that knowledge, not just for others, but even more importantly, for ourselves.

Related: Correspond Broadly
Related: Sharing Before You Feel Ready

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