Paul Graham has a new essay up that discusses words and ideas. It’s an interesting piece that reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. The quote from Daniel Boorstin—a University of Chicago historian and the 12th Librarian of Congress—is “I write to discover what I think.1” I first saw it years ago and it made a big impression on me. Indeed, you can think of Irreal as a result of that impression.
Graham’s point is slightly different: you can’t think until you write. Or, at least, you can’t have fully formed thoughts, you can’t completely understand your thoughts until you try to explain them to someone else by writing them down. In Graham’s words,
If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
That seems provocative—and, of course, it was meant to be—but he has a point and justifies it in the essay. As with all of Graham’s writing, it’s definitely worth taking a few minutes to read it.