The benefits of Writing: A discipline for constant personal growth
A few years ago I dropped my PhD in Artificial Intelligence in the middle to use my free time to start reading about everything, product management, economy, psychology, statistics, management and so on. I was also working at a StartUp company, so the knowledge I was acquiring combined with the rich openness that a StartUp provides brought together theory and practice and I was really growing fast, but I was still missing something: I wanted to make all of this learnings more organized, more consolidated and share it with others.
The third dimension arrived after some time, when I started writing articles and talking at Meetups and conferences about the things I learned, and this was the missing ingredient I needed. It’s so powerful to write that I was completely amazed, it made me feel much stronger and I definitely give a lot of credits to my professional growth over the writings that I published.
The 3-Steps Growth Virtuous Cycle
Writing is learning and learning is fuel to even more writings leading to a virtuous cycle of personal growth. I believe that there’s three main components of this cycle represented in the image above, it usually starts with a combination of study and practice.
To study these days we have more content than ever with the internet, a lot of e-books, portals such as Medium, online course platforms and the biggest revolution of content in the last few years: Podcasts — bringing information consumable anywhere such as washing dishes or while you workout at the gym (a gigantic time-optimizer).
One recommendation here: get out of your comfort zone, read about most distinct themes, don't stick to your specialization area-Example: If you’re a developer, read about psychology, philosophy, product and so on).
Practice is usually obtained in work but so the most autonomous environment you work the better, that’s a big advantage working at a startup where you probably will have to participate in more areas of the company, which will allow you to practice a wide range of different skill sets. If your environment didn’t allow you to practice the things you’re learning you might consider to change it.
Another alternative is to practice in other activities in your personal life, you can exercise emotional intelligence skills in your daily-basis relationships or practice things like management working at parallel projects (such as being volunteer in a non-governamental organization).
Closing the cycle, like the most influential pedagogues such as Paulo Freire said: to learn you must reach Praxis, which is a combination of practice and study activities followed by reflection, and writing is a hell of a trigger for that. Writing comes as a tool where you can achieve discipline over reflection activities, ensuring you reach Praxis cycle.
Let’s stick with the cycle: continuously studying and practicing, and from time to time when you feel that you learn something strong you write it — it can be letters and drawings, it can be an article or a presentation but you’ll put energy into it, you’ll reflect and compile your recent learning. This way you’ll continuously achieve Praxis and each time you’ll be better at it: therefore you’ll reach exponential growth!
Writing might impact on your psychological state
According to Netflix culture, self-improving and self-motivating employees are among rare and precious, and writing will give you exposure in a way that will definitely help you achieve both status. Let’s get back to the Maslow pyramid (image above): as we saw above writing will operate in the area of self-actualization with the Praxis Virtuous Cycle but it can also operate in the Esteem sector:
The visibility you’ll gain in the market with your articles will increase your network, opening a lot of doors for future opportunities and provide knowledge exchange — the human connection can also weigh a lot over Esteem, the fact that you are more and more safe that you have people wanting to work with you all of the time will impact your mood.
Writing can also achieve that kind of satisfaction we humans have after seeing something done by ourselves finished, such as cooking our own dinner using that special recipe or solving that super complex calculus problem that the teacher didn’t even ask for you (ok, maybe I’ve gone too far in this one!).
After you write an article, with an extra small fraction of work you can prepare a talk to present at Meetups or conferences, which enhances the impact of all the previous advantages plus a training to your communication skills — you’ll also help promote your company showing the community how incredible you guys are, attracting interested talents! — RH shall love it ;)
A "very" quick guide on how to start writing
To start I recommend you to stick to a challenge that you recently overcame at your work, or something that you learned by practice and study. For example, it could be a new feature, project or product that your team launch: you can write about the product or the process you used to develop it, or you can focus on the problem you solved with this product, or in the methodology you used to come up with the idea behind it. You can even talk about a failure that made you learn new things (this is usually the best learnings)!
My first article was about an experience I had creating an Agile Data Science team. I was reading a lot about management, agile and data science for a while and after 6 months running the team with all of our processes more mature I was ready to write the article! I gathered all the things we learned, documented it and put it all together in the article, this was amazing for us to consolidate everything, reflect and propose even more ideas, we also used it as a guide to stick to our working processes .
Final Thoughts
Gathering up everything, my main recommendation is: Start writing right now, think about the last learning you had and start scratching the paper. You’ll definitely be reinvigorated after your first article is published — not to mention the amazing sensation you’ll feel when you start receiving messages of people thanking you for your piece of work.
