Aircraft Carriers and Zodiac Boats27 days beforeAn insightful conversation with a colleague inspired me to articulate the distinction…Thinking to write

My Self-work Routine2019I started intentionally working on myself a year ago today, writing my…Letting My Purpose Find Me2019In my own clock, I spoke metaphorically about learning to listen to…I’ve had this realization about myself recently, and it’s been rather useful in gaining a bit more understanding about how my mind works. I am writing it down in hopes it would help you in your own self-reflections.

The rewrite count2021As a software engineer, I often see a struggle that both teams…The well-worn “Writing to think” maxim is something that’s near and dear to my heart: weaving a sequential story of the highly non-linear processes that are happening in my mind is a precious tool. I usually recommend developing the muscle for writing to think as a way to keep our thoughts organized to my colleagues and friends. Often, when I do, I am asked: “What do I write about?”

It’s a good question. At least for me, the ability to write appears to be closely connected to the space in which I am doing the thinking. It seems like the whole notion of “writing to think” might also work in reverse: when I don’t have something to write about, it might be a signal that my thinking space is fairly small or narrow.

The problem understanding framework2022With my apologies for taking a scenic route and sincere thanks for…There might be fascinating and very challenging problems that I am working on. I could be spending many hours wracking my brain trying to solve them. However, if this thinking doesn’t spur me to write about it, I am probably inhabiting a rather confined problem space.

Live as our customer2023This principle is something that feels very intuitive at first blush, but…I find that writing code and software engineering in general tend to collapse this space for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love making software. It’s one of those things that I genuinely enjoy and get a “coder’s high” from.

No ship ums2023I’ve been thinking about the path that software dandelions take toward becoming…Yet, when doing so, I find that my thoughts are sharply focused and narrow. They don’t undulate and wander in vast spaces. They don’t get lost just for the sake of getting lost. Writing code is about bringing an idea to life. It’s a very concretizing process. Writing code is most definitely a process of writing to think, but it’s more of “writing it”, rather than “writing about it”.

The outcome is a crisp – albeit often spaghetti-like – set of instructions that are meant to be understood by a machine, which for all its complicatedness is a lot less complex than a human mind.

Convergent innovation2022As a sort of thought appetizer, here’s a vignette attempting to intersect…On the other hand, when I was doing more strategy work a few years back, I found myself brimming with ideas to write down. It was very easy to just knock out a post – nearly every idea I had was begging to be played with and turned into a story to share. I was in the wide-open space of thinking among people, and particularly long-term horizon, broad thinking, and wandering.

Framing2022When encountering an infinity-problem, we may have enough wherewithal to resist the…Strategy Aperture2023The concept of embodied strategy continues to captivate me. Recently, I found…The law of tightening aperture2023What happens to the teams with wide apertures over time? Does the…Nothing’s wrong with inhabiting smaller problem spaces for a little while. However, it’s probably not something I would pick as the only way of being. “Inhabiting” brings habits, and habits entrench. Becoming entrenched in smaller problem spaces means that the larger spaces become less and less accessible over time, resulting in strategic myopia.

Models and structured reasoning2023Because the first step of the reasoning structure is just a guess,…The Bootstrapping Phasethe day afterI think I have a slightly better way of describing a particular…Flexibility of the mediumlinks here, 2024I did this fun little experiment recently. I took my two last…It seems that to avoid such a diagnosis, we’ve gotta keep finding ways to think in spaces big enough to spur us to write. To use an analogy, “writing to think” is like developing a habit of brushing our teeth, and “thinking to write” is a way to check if we indeed follow this habit. If we find ourselves struggling to write, then maybe we need to broaden the problem space we inhabit.