> The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them. > > A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. > > There are of course kinds of thinking that can be done without writing. If you don't need to go too deeply into a problem, you can solve it without writing. If you're thinking about how two pieces of machinery should fit together, writing about it probably won't help much. And when a problem can be described formally, you can sometimes solve it in your head. But if you need to solve a complicated, ill-defined problem, it will almost always help to write about it. Which in turn means that someone who's not good at writing will almost always be at a disadvantage in solving such problems. > > You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things. > > People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can't afford to. > > https://www.paulgraham.com/read.html Some problems cannot be solved in your head. You just need to cut down hard problems into simpler ones up to the root of the problem. Then you can tackle each node until the tree is cut down. #problem-solving #thinking #reading #writing