It's Time to Start Writing (2019)
alexnixon.github.io
alexnixon.github.io
Both the author and the audience greatly benefit from the writing. Writing clarifies and structures thinking – helping the reader understand the points the author is making.
As a bit more context, I used to work at McKinsey and much of my job fit into two roles: (1) translating what employees were thinking into something executives could understand, and (2) making PowerPoint slides. In other words, I was often there because employees couldn't write well. But, I also found PowerPoint lacking – it's hard to get some of the more important points across (creating some confusion) because it doesn't allow for longer-form thought.
I've put a bunch of thoughts together on why writing is important and how we fix our education system to make people better writers. It's based on my experiences supporting tens of thousands of students on improving writing skills – https://bradsblog.com/2020/05/15/1-writing-is-the-most-impor....
As it turns out, most people aren't similar to the Hacker News population – they won't seek out and act on feedback on their own. As such, we've found the best way to improve writing skills is to require people to get feedback and act on it. This means working with K-12 and higher ed institutions.
It is the combination of business understanding and writing that is Amazon's superpower.
Overall, I'm not saying that there aren't a bunch of other important things to running a business, just that great writing makes running a business far easier.
On a side note – implementing performance management gets crazy gains without requiring process changes. I used to get an immediate 30%+ productivity bump when I'd implement performance management (e.g., metrics, daily huddles) in a place that had little of it.
> The technique consists of asking the question “Why?” iteratively until you get to the root of the problem. Let’s see a quick example:
Problem: The website is showing error 500.
1. Why? Because the web framework’s routing component malfunctioned.
2. Why? Because it requires another component, which itself malfunctioned.
3. Why? Because this component of the web framework requires the intl extension, which isn’t working.
4. Why? Because it was accidentally deactivated after the server software got updated.
Jeff Bezos's 2017 shareholder letter highlights some of his thinking around 6-page narratives: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...
This Slab article by Ben Bashaw is pretty good on the topic: https://slab.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-management-strategy...
Scott does a good job of some of the major points of Amazon writing based on his time there (this was written based on a previous HN discussion on Amazon writing): https://blog.usejournal.com/writing-docs-at-amazon-e02580861...
1. Start with an outline. This will help you cement the most important points of your writing/argument in your mind and enable you to start filling in the gaps. Often, I'll spend a lot of time getting the major points I'm making very crisp before I write a full draft. Doing this will also help you identify what's missing. The most important parts to focus on are (1) where a reader may disagree (i.e. where you'll need to make your argument stronger and back with evidence), and (2) where your reader will have questions that you'll need to answer.
2. Get feedback and revise 2-3 times. Getting feedback and acting on it is the single most valuable thing you can do; however, most people don't know how to provide writing feedback. They'll focus on grammar unless you specify what you want the reader to think about. There are two strategies here – (1) Provide your reader with a list of questions you want them to answer. I always use the following four: What did you learn? Is what you learned compelling (if not, why wasn't it compelling)? What didn't you learn that you wanted to learn? Where was it clear/not clear? (2) add specific comments/questions within your writing in places you are less comfortable with and want feedback.
Imagine someone wants details on a graph or table, the presenter replies orally and can often remain as vague as desired, possibly making the requester look like an a*e if he/she insists.
However, as the lecturer in the video details, don’t expect the writing done for thinking to be useful to readers! When we think, there is usually a certain incrementalism, whereas when we read we’re trying to resolve dissonances in a current mental model. That’s a key distinction, it means you need to make people care or understand why their mental model is broken when writing to informs reader. When we write for our own thinking, we usually understand the general problem already and are just traversing the problem space to better understand different components.
That would explain an awful lot about my university reading experience.
Done well, slides can be incredibly informative (link below). Because it’s visual, you can present the shape of an argument well before having to articulate the details, a tremendously powerful tool for communicating complex ideas. Because it’s nonlinear, you can include a level of detail that would be tedious in a document.
Yes, these benefits often enable people to spout half-understood BS. But the medium itself is sticky for good reason - it’s powerful.
Edit: link https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-e...
Bad powerpoints lead to bad decisions, and Edward Tufte addressed this years ago. https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
You could probably find an even worse ppt that justified the Iraq invasion, but nobody thinks they're dumber than the DoD. What about NASA though? Incredibly smart, hardworking, technically savvy engineers saw their recommendations get ground to dust by powerpoint. They couldn't write a good technical powerpoint. You can't either. Write the whitepaper instead. Use powerpoint for pretty pictures and graphs.
The problem this didn’t address though is when in-depth white papers are often written, they may not be read (or only read in a cursory fashion) because the audience may be stretched too thin on time.
PowerPoints abbreviated style is both a strength and weakness.
The difficult thing is understanding. Powerpoint masks this, so readers don't go looking for extra time to comprehend. Powerpoint also encourages poor communication (eg auto-resizing text blocks as you add more/longer entries) so the writer doesn't think deeply about the document they're making. It's a strength in some fields, and a weakness in others.
Your boss asks for a deck? Sure, make the best damn deck you can. We've all got to earn a living. But one day, when you get to set the meeting agenda, be better to your reports than your boss was to you.
I suspect we’d then see the same hate talking about how all these executive summaries hamper understanding by glossing over nuanced details.
Granted, PowerPoint is often misused. But just because I try to hunt with a shotgun at 300 meters doesn’t make the shotgun a piece of shyte. I just misapplied the tool.
I can say, if you have a busy boss and constantly give them heaps of white papers as your communication tool, it’s a good way to ensure your concerns are rarely heard let alone addressed.
I think there’s a natural dichotomy between limited bandwidth and understanding complex topics. I personally don’t think white papers solve that problem.
The problem is that in addition to the clay thrower, the shotgun comes equipped with a scope and a 300 meter paper target. Yes people are fools for misapplying the tool, but the manufacturer is to blame for misleading their customers to the tool's capabilities.
The problem is that bad writing is immediately obvious to fluent speakers, but bad powerpoints are not. Powerpoints are also susceptible to institutional styling (look up the face-melters that the American DoD designs).
I would wager that a busy boss will pay more attention to your ideas if they're presented as a tight page or two. Good writing is hard to do, and takes time for almost everyone. Presenting topics in a way that makes their complexity evident helps people allocate their attention correctly.
White papers don't solve the problem, but at least they don't make it worse.
This is a very good point
I should have probably started with a disclaimer: I'm a PhD scientist at a major American R1 university. I collaborate with researchers and business partners around the world. I regularly write/share powerpoint decks, because it's the right tool for the job when I have figures and pictures of my work to share. When I post design documents, calculations, etc, I always write long-form, typically using the Tufte-handout class.
I started writing investment thoughts last year, and the more I write, the more I realize it is a superpower.
It creates clarity of thought, accountability, and enforces longterm thinking.
AND, if you do it publicly, it can lead to unexpected conversations & opportunities.
Link below in case anyone's interested - always appreciate any feedback :) https://playingfordoubles.substack.com/
One thing I've noticed is that 1) your stock picks are almost exclusively in the tech sector and 2) your initial pick was in April in 2019 so there isn't a lot of data to drawn conclusions from.
As an example, simply buying XLK (technology ETF) on the same start date gives an absolute return of roughly 43% and gives potentially less systemic risk (I haven't calculated the exact risk numbers for your portfolio, but it's probably a safe bet given it's diversification).
Instead of measuring strictly on % return, I would suggest measuring performance in a way that factors in volatility as well.
But there's also rhetorical narrative, which is used for persuasion, not clarification. Create a story with a good person and a bad person, or at least good actions and bad actions, append a heavyweight emotional hit of some kind, keep the language as simple as possible, and you'll have no trouble selling your point to at least some people - no matter how nonsensical it is to others.
This is how advertising, political spin, social media influence campaigns, and troll farms work.
It's also how thought leaders try to work, but luckily not many are experts in rhetoric.
It's incredibly powerful because the human brain uses narrative as a kind of alias for information transfer. As soon as an idea is packaged as a narrative - a story, parable, something about people - it immediately becomes much more persuasive than a plain statement of fact.
If you look at company culture it's almost invariably based on a narrative about the goals of the company and the kinds of people that fit in. Some founders deliberately engineer an appealing narrative and use it as a cover story for their own personal interests.
Point being not all narratives are benign, and story telling - not just writing - really can be a superpower. But that doesn't mean it's inherently positive.
I've been developing software so long, that my process has become "instinctual." I actually have a hard time explaining it to people on demand.
So I started to write about it[0].
Turns out, there's a heck of a lot of detail in my personal process, and, when I write it out, that detail (and the structure), reveals itself.
Basically, I don't particularly care whether or not anyone actually reads what I write, but the act of writing has helped me to "name" my structure.
Once I can find its name, I control it.
There is also a large benefit to other engineers getting up to date on a system, why things were done a specific way, why a technology was chosen, what tradeoffs were considered and why.
What would a documentation or comment-chain ideally be constituted of? How would you change existing docs in a practical way which would reflect both deprecated and replacement functionality?
When you originally considered "RFC Culture" what system did you have in mind?
Sure enough, that will help to find clarity for sure. Just don't expect that it will help to find clarity for anyone else beside the author.
In a fast moving team setting, what most people hate the most is reading. If the context is not clearly set why reading something is utterly important, most people won't even bother to open the page, document, note or whatever.
The mental load is immense these days, and reading adds an enormous plus to that in a very negative way, so most people tries to escape this cognitive load.
Of course, you can use your authority to force people to read, but people will simply hate the experience even more.
That's an odd setup, but it's probably what makes this system work -- an organizational admission that this meeting setup is actually better than walking people through slides. One advantage the author doesn't mention is that this "alone together" mode gives each participant more time to think before having to fit their thoughts into a group discussion, which likely promotes divergent thinking and gives people room to ask important, difficult questions.
If all the stakeholders fit in the "2 pizza" team, regularly talk/meet, and regularly review progress/ideas/etc. then sure, writing is irrelevant.
Frankly, for me, reading is a far LOWER mental load than listening to someone talk.
Talking is linear, and often stream of consciousness. I can't jump forwards to see if they are drawing the conclusion they seem to be aiming at, and if so, scan the rest for any variations.
I can't jump back, without disrupting others, when they have made a cognitive leap that I didn't follow, to re-read to see if I missed anything.
Often people aren't able to quickly order their thoughts, speak to these points, and stay on point/relevant in the face of q&a when it's a deep technical topic. I'd much rather read their perspective.
https://www.amazon.com/Style-Clarity-Chicago-Writing-Publish...
The chapters from 1 through Cohesion II are better at teaching clarity of thought in writing than any I've read anywhere. Most books focus on grammar and style and ignore the good stuff in between.
For those who like Williams, he also wrote books on how to build arguments and conduct research!
On a slight tangent, my writing has improved tremendously since working at Amazon. I’m far from great now, but I’ve always been contrarian and saw most writing as needless fluff. Over time I’ve come to appreciate how writing forces clarity, both for the writer and the reader.
This idea of writing as a proxy for thinking is the essence of many misconceptions.
I know many 1st-class thinkers who have such hard time in writing.
What separates most people from good writing has very little to do with style, grammar, local sentences structure, word selection, or even content per se.
Most people can't write well because they don't know how to control the logical sequence in which they present their ideas.
And that is the single most important act necessary to clear writing.
I shared more on what that means here in a recent essay [0].
Well crafted slides force a similar degree of clarity when approached with the same level of intention. The problem is that most people are poor presenters, and presenting is a learned skill.
Documents gone bad encourage people to write more words than necessary which, when used for simple tasks, result in large amounts of time wasted preparing something that no one reads.
I think one downside of a document culture is it leaves less room for selling an idea- which may be less important in the decision to light up a new business unit, but put at a disadvantage work that is primarily visual in form.
But most people are not good presenters, and so their slides are either a wall of text OR they're an absence of text that make the slides impossible to parse without a recording of the speaker.
So it's not necessarily that writing is the BEST format, it's just not the worse when it comes to the lowest common denominator.
The other upside that the post fails to notice is that it forces everyone to get used to writing, which will lead to better documentation overall.
Is Bezos referring to cases where the "why" is not clear, and not explained?
Lots of times I'll use a bullet list, with indented subitem bullets explaining why, or going into detail. I find this format much easier to read than a wall of text. And it makes the hierarchy clear.
Note that the article uses 3 bullet-lists, which were easy to read/scan quickly.
I wholeheartedly agree with this premise, but without some guardrails I feel like this advice leads to dumpster fires like Medium.
I do think presentations ('powerpoints', though Powerpoint itself is pretty horrible) have their place, if done well — but they very rarely are.