Personal Intellectual Leverage
Why writing effectively is your competitive advantage
Writing is personal intellectual leverage. Use it to influence the spread of your ideas, seek feedback, process and capture decisions.
Chances are you aren’t writing enough.
It may be because you’re afraid you’re not good at it. Yes, you send e-mails and slack messages. When was the last time you sat down and wrote an articulate brief, opportunity one-pager, product requirements document, business case, architectural decision record or thorough self reflection of your own performance? When for personal pleasure?
If you’re in Tech you probably have the ability to work remotely (at least some of the time). Depending on your role you might spend 50%+ of your working hours in meetings. What if that time could be reclaimed with a shift towards more asynchronous work?
Maybe writing isn’t how you think — you’re a verbalizer and have to say. But then you must also repeat. The primary benefit is that writing is durable, portable and for some time infinitely shareable.
Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still more so life. - XI. 29
Getting Started
Writing effectively begins by understanding your audience. Start with yourself. You take notes during the day but do you take time to process your day and reflect?
HBR wrote a fantastic piece in 2016 Want to be an exceptional leader? Buy a journal. Parroting it’s suggestions:
Buy a journal (physical or digital — I personally use bear.app)
Commit to 15 minutes a day of free writing
Find a quiet place
Don’t share your journal with anyone
Insofar as triggers to spark this daily habit here are some:
From HBR
How am I feeling right now? About my leadership?
What deserves my most quality attention?
What is the most outrageous (or fun or novel) idea I’ve heard in the last 24 hours? What do I love about it?
From me
How can I create a sense of clarity for those around me?
What have I been curious to learn more about but struggled to get started on?
What, quite frankly, must I accomplish this week? What can drop?
Who in my life — personal, work — do I need to cultivate or deepen a relationship with?
Once you’ve done this for a while you can take it a step further. I recommend using “Snippets” on a weekly basis to keep your leader in the know. Send these on Fridays and pull a synthesis from your daily habit.
There are four questions that have stood the test of time (or at least since when I was indoctrinated at Google a decade ago 😆):
My largest accomplishment of the week was…
Something I learned was…
Something I struggled with was…
Something I’m curious about is…
Your weekly answers to these questions should be brief. They can be mined from your journal. They serve, for you, as a way of creating connection and 1:1 fodder. They serve, for them, as a log for inquiry and feedback — coaching, evaluation and praise.
What are you waiting for?
Sharpening the axe
Beyond pure practice, writing effectively also requires — you guessed it — reading. Reading well might not be a topic you’ve paid much attention to. One of the most thorough articles on the topic is from Farnam Street: How to Read A Book which, is, a summary of Adler’s How to Read a Book.
You probably read for information constantly but are you aware of the four different levels of reading?
Elementary Reading: What you were taught in elementary school
Inspectional Reading: Systematic skimming & Inspectional reading to get the gist
Analytical Reading: Chewing and digesting the work via notes & marginalia
Syntopical Reading: Comparatively reading many books on the same topic
If writing requires an understanding of audience, reading requires an understanding of your goals and the type of book you’re reading.
Beyond getting better at reading, in general, reading about writing is your next adventure. This subject is broad. Pointedly, I’ve learned a lot from what essayist Paul Graham has to say:
We’ll come back to ways to improve your writing via rewriting, editing, common constructs, leveraging LLMs and making time to write in future posts.
Final Thoughts
The most powerful leverage — beyond debt — that you can build is intellectual leverage. Your writing becomes a knowledge base that compounds over time.
If used intra-organizationally, especially in Knowledge Work, it makes each day just a tad bit easier. Think about your future self or those that might come after you. Build that second brain and lead in more ways than one.