Writing as a growth tool

This post was originally published on my Hashnode blog!

A fact that has been established over and over is that the art of writing is also the art of mental sticking. To save something in your memory longer, you need to jot it down somewhere. I embraced the art of writing as a tool for me to learn last year and my growth has been more steady than before. Let's break it down:

✍ Writing as an Engineer

Humans are never perfect, as much as we love perfection in our lives, there is always the element of volatility, the element of uncertainty. This applies to learning as well, if you learn a language and you don't speak it often. You forget it. You cram a user manual but never use the product? You never know how to use the product!

Whenever we learn something new, we tend to unconsciously tie it to something else in our lives. For example, when we learned the alphabet in school, we were taught to tie it with something ('A for Apple' for example), and this is generally how we store and recall things. Writing is also a way to recall things learnt, so I learned about Docker today and Docker vs Virtualization, I pen it down.

I don't need to memorize/cram the various concepts and definitions there to recall something. By writing, I am reinforcing what I learned because for I would structure my write-up in such a way that I would understand in the future, hence improving my existing knowledge on the topic.

📢 Writing publicly as an Engineer

Okay, this one is a bit harder. Writing publicly, or blogging is when we take that write-up we created and put it out there for others to benefit from whatever we learnt. When writing publicly, you are no longer writing just for yourself to understand but for others from multiple nationalities (it's a global village, remember?) to understand you.

This is where your communication skills come into play, depending on underlying factors, it might be difficult to start or easy. But one thing for sure is that with consistency, you would get better. We can't escape the web of society so our communication key is important in the long run, what better way to improve it than writing to an "audience"?

📈 Growth as a byproduct

There is this saying I hear here and there: "If you want to learn something well, teach it". I don't know who said it first but he was darn right! By writing, we reinforce what we already know because fact-checking occurs, also in the process of writing about a topic, we tend to simplify it to encourage easy comprehension, and we also get to discover more about it as we dig deeper into the topic. These are all elements of growth.

By fact-checking, we stamp out the doubts and realign our thoughts. By simplifying a topic, we present it with a perspective which we might have never thought of. By digging deeper, we learn more hence improving our proficiency. Growth would happen unconsciously, but first, consistency!

💪 Consistency as a Golden Rule

Whichever goal you aim to achieve through writing won't come overnight, and this is where the repetition of your writing plays a role. Growth is a gradual process that is cemented slowly over time. To nurture it, we should repeat the act of writing.

Consistency 🏗 is greater than Intensity 💪

Especially when starting new, you don't want to bore yourself out too quickly or burn out from too much work. You want to stretch your progress and growth over months instead of weeks, you want writing to become another one of your daily activities, not a chore. Building slowly and progressively always wins, growth is never instantaneous.

Another article is finished. Thanks a lot for the read, writing has been a skill I started building last year and it's been a pivotal point for me, wanted to share a few tips and insights and maybe convince you to pick up the pencil (or the keyboard) once in a while. You just never know who might open your article. Have fun, bye-bye 👋