Writing compounds

Every essay you publish is a permanent record of your thinking at that moment. Future readers find it, link to it, quote it. Unlike a tweet, it doesn't decay.

The compounding isn't in the audience — it's in you. Writing forces clarity. Clarity compounds. In five years, you'll have five years of clarified thinking recorded somewhere, visible to you and to others. That's a lot.

There's also a strange thing where writing makes you think better in real-time. Once you've written out your reasoning clearly enough that a stranger could follow it, you've actually understood the thing. Until then, you haven't — you've just approximated it.