The thinking mind moves horizontally, but the writing mind moves vertically.

Like the eye, the mind likes to wander. It'll constantly skip around and change focus unless it has something to tie it down. Think of meditation, and how the mind hops between the surface of various ideas like a stone skipping across water.

Writing is the opposite.

Focusing on a single topic for a long time is arduous because it forces you to resist the mind’s natural impulse to skip between topics. The writing mind is able to go deep, and by keeping the focus constant, the pen can explore an idea with levels of rigor that the thinking mind can't achieve on its own.

If your thinking on a topic feels superficial, it’s probably because you haven’t written about it. Maybe you're skipping between ideas, abandoning unfinished drafts in your Google Doc instead of anchoring yourself to a single topic and pushing through when you inevitably get stuck.

Only when you commit to deliberate writing can you begin to explore an idea with the vertical depth that unlocks clarity, insight, and true understanding.

If you want to deepen your thinking, I’m hosting a Writing Sprint on Friday, November 3rd.

You’ll work against a strict deadline to draft, edit, and publish a piece of writing — all in one day. Instead of an unfinished idea that gets buried in your Google Drive, you’ll finish the day with a published piece you’re proud of.

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Today's Finds

How French Art Inspired Walt Disney: This is David catnip. France is my favorite country to visit and Disney is my entrepreneurial hero. Walt visited Europe for the first time at the age of 16, following the end of World War I, as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. He made another grand European tour in 1935. This book, documentary, and art exhibit booklet shows how Walt pulled from Rococo aesthetics, French visual culture, and European children's books. The prompt book for Sleeping Beauty was based on the Lindau Gospels, the pink on the castle in the center of Disneyland was a quintessential Rococo color, and the anthropomorphism of 18th century porcelain teapots inspired the humanity of the animal characters in Disney's films.

​The Beauty of Chalk: The tools we use shape our thought, and the field of mathematics is shaped by the chalkboard. The medium of writing with chalk can turn math into a social experience. The size of a chalkboard allows multiple people to analyze the same formulas at the same time, and the speed at which people write on a chalkboard helps others follow along. The viewer doesn't just see the end result. They see how it came to be. This isn't the case with, say, a PowerPoint presentation because the answers are given to you.

​Sequoia's Investment in YouTube: This memo was only released because of a lawsuit between Google and Viacom, and it outlines how one of the world's top venture capital firms thinks through their investments. Sequoia agreed to invest $1 million, then another $4 million before YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion. At the time, user-generated content was all the rage. The trend started with text, then images, then audio, and Sequoia thought video would be next. The memo is also a reminder of how trends that seem obvious in retrospect weren't exactly obvious at the beginning.

​Human as Media: One of the core differences between mass media and Internet media is how information is filtered. With mass media, filtering happens before distribution. Book publishers, newspapers, film studios, and television networks would block pieces of content from ever being shared. On the Internet, filtering happens after distribution. It's the algorithms, not the gatekeepers, who control what gets seen. Journalists have lost their monopoly on information too. They've been disrupted by armies of citizen journalists who can collectively sort and filter information faster than the world's biggest and most advanced newsrooms.

The Open Source Disruption of Media: The news industry is being disrupted in the same way that the open source movement disrupted the traditional software industry. Media outlets have historically drawn their advantage from exclusive access to people, information, and data. That meant building relationships with experts and established sources on specific topics. Today's world is different. Anybody can share their ideas online. The news moves faster. Even at the world's biggest newsrooms, it's hard for the staff to compete with all the people on the Internet who can get the latest information from their living room, hold news organizations accountable for publishing the truth, and collectively work 24/7. That's why journalism is moving toward an open-source news model.

How I Write

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531,000 people read Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter every week. It's a deep dive into all aspects of his writing process: growing a newsletter, using the Jobs to Be Done framework to think about topics, editing drafts, and writing for high-level people.

Here are a few things that stuck out:

1. The world suffers from a scarcity of well-formulated questions from inquisitive people. Lenny has worked in tech for over a decade, and he’s still surprised by how open people are to answering questions and revealing “trade secrets.”
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2. If you want to have an existential breakdown, try to make each sentence an aesthetic masterpiece. Ditch the poetry and focus on clarity instead. Lenny: “Every time I think about how to write beautifully, I just get stuck and it just slows everything down.”
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3. If you want to be widely read, try to solve people’s problems. The peskier the problem, and the more useful your solution, the further your writing will spread.

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