three year productive thinking anniversary

It’s been exactly three years since I wrote the first post on this blog. At the start, there were two reasons for this blog: the first was to keep myself accountable as I strove to become more productive and grow as an individual, and the second was to push myself to think deeply through interesting ideas. These two components lead to the two words in the name of the blog (productive thinking) and is also the reason why all my blog posts have two words in the title. There was a third, more indirect reason, which was to keep my writing skills from becoming rusty as I foresaw that I’d be writing very little within my engineering program at Columbia. Over time, each one of these reasons have faded away, and as a result, my blog posts look very different today.

The productivity/accountability reasoning just naturally faded as I exited my obsession with productivity, a phase that I’ve noticed is rather common at these hyper-academic, elite college institutions. Perhaps this was not a good development as I’ve definitely been a lot less productive these past couple years, but it isn’t something that bothers me much (although I will have the occasional twinge where I wish I was better at software development). The reason behind stopping my daily habit of thinking through/writing down interesting ideas is also clear to me. At a certain point, writing these blog posts was taking up a large amount of time as well as headspace that I needed to use on other work. Once I got busier and had bigger priorities, spending one or two hours a day on blogging simply wasn’t sustainable.

I read my earliest posts last night, and I couldn’t help but feel like the quality of my posts has decreased since those days. In an attempt to make blogging regularly more sustainable, I forced myself to proofread less and care less about quality—those first couple of posts took around three hours, which I can normally crank out in an hour or so. Yet that change didn’t even result in its intended effect—nowadays, months pass before I recall the existence of my blog, compile a macro view of changes in my life, and post it here in a fashion that reads like an esoteric diary entry. At this point, the purpose behind my blog has shifted to one that’s far more conventional—it provides a way for me to log events in my life as well as briefly think about changes I’d like to imbue for the future.

purposes

Something that I currently struggle a lot with while working on my startup is purpose, not in the grand “what is the meaning of life” way but rather figuring out why I’m spending time on something. For example, nowadays I might be reading an article on a topic that’s in whatever startup idea space I’m exploring at the time–it feels productive, but without having a clear benefit/reason behind reading said article, I might as well have saved both my time and mental energy as I didn’t make any direct progress on my startup. This extends to many things I do at work: checking out a startup’s software tooling in the space, working on a side project to gain more coding experience, reading interesting news articles on the startup landscape, the list goes on. The other side of the equation is tough too—since I want to optimize whatever I’m currently working on, I often just end up not doing many of the aforementioned little things that, lumped together, are probably better than just sitting around wondering what to do. Failing to manage feelings of making progress and getting lost is quite demoralizing (speaking from personal experience).

This sort of reasoning extends a lot to how I generally think about how I spend my time. I work out because I like how it makes me look and physically feel, and also because it’s a really good mental break from working in front of a computer screen all day. I play video games because I find it really fun/it makes me happy, and most of all, it provides me a way to keep making memories with friends as well as make new friends. I could keep generating examples, but I can pretty confidently say that I can easily think of the reasons why I do certain things–it might not be the best or the most correct reason, but I can decipher the honest reasons behind why I do the things I do.

I’ve written many times on this blog that I want to blog more often for X reason. I rarely ever do—in fact, I’m pretty sure that most of the time, I just forget about it the next day and the habit dies with the initial post. I think this is because the reasons that I list for starting these habits just aren’t strong enough–without constant conscious reminder, motivation inevitably fades. I honestly think that’s fine—if I have strong enough reasons for doing things, as long as those reasons hold strong, then my habits continue. If my habits die, then I probably didn’t have that strong of a reason for doing them in the first place—now, if they’re dying just because I don’t think about said reasons, then that’s a problem.

writing and clarity of thought

I’ve noticed that writing about something, even something that I know very well, typically exposes that I don’t know it very well at all. Putting ideas into sentences in a blog post is quite a test—it’s different from even speaking thoughts out loud as it requires putting thoughts into a single, optimized stream of words. It’s hard to get sentences perfect on the first pass through, and without proofreading/editing, it makes more sense that I feel my blog posts nowadays are lower quality than my initial posts. Ideas pre-writing are not only ill-understood but also incomplete—I typically have some idea of what I want to write about before I start, and then I end up writing twice as much as intended, typically due to adding some random tangential idea that came up in the midst of writing (e.g. I set out to write only this section on writing down ideas, but I ended up also writing the preceding section on purposes). Some of the ideas that I initially intend to write about end up being left out simply because the post thread diverges too much from the original thoughts. I also end up splicing a lot of ideas back into the essay once I’m finished with a tangent, with varying degrees of fluidity in transition.

The thing I find most impressive about successful founders is their apparent clarity of thought. Perhaps they know these concepts so intimately or they’ve practiced communicating so much that it only seems that way to me, but regardless, I think being able to break down/communicate concepts clearly is one of the most valuable skills to have when building a startup/working with cofounders. I envy a lot of these successful founders for precisely this ability.

Writing blog posts proves to me that my thoughts can feel clear in my head before trying to put them into writing demonstrates that they’re actually quite incomplete. This also means that ideas that I haven’t put in writing are going to be rather ill-formed. I do believe that I’m better at forming ideas through writing relative to verbal communication—both are areas I want to work on with the expressed purpose of improving general clarity of thought. To that end, I’m going to start putting more ideas in writing, whether that’s startup research threads or blog posts (or possibly both!). Anywho, if this motivation holds, hopefully that’ll mean I’ll be updating you all on here more often :).