Sometimes when I think about writing a blog post, I imagine that my chosen topic has probably already been covered thoroughly by someone else somewhere, and it’s probably not adding any value to the world to just rehash that same information. Or, similarly, that before starting I need to read everything that’s ever been written on the subject to verify whether or not I have anything new to add to the discourse.
I like to call this concept the Writing Corollary to the Efficient-Market Hypothesis. Essentially, there are so many humans who are thinking and writing about so many things—especially since the advent of the blog—that every idea I could ever want to write about has already been written before. Not the exact same words, of course, but the same idea. There is another corollary that applies to business ideas as well. The common phrasing is “Well, if that was such a good business idea then someone else would have done it by now.” But that’s a discussion for another day.
My recent personal experiences have helped to break down this fallacy of thought, to some extent. Even if we assume that the postulate is true, and “there is nothing new under the sun” when it comes to the written word, I think there is still some value in rewriting it. Let me enumerate a few reasons I’ve come up with.
1. It may be the first time a reader encounters the idea.
Nowadays people get information from a nearly infinite variety of sources. I used to think that there is typically one “best” authority on a particular subject, and eventually everyone will gravitate to that source. This way of thinking may be an artifact of my schooling as a child; I was highly focused on math and science and in such fields there often is a recognized authority. But for any realm of thought where objective truth is difficult to pin down or simply doesn’t exist, this isn’t true at all. And in the great expanse of life, most human knowledge and ideas fall into this category.
So, unlike learning mathematics, where a person is almost always introduced to the idea of calculus through a textbook or lecture in school, there is no standard well-worn path for gaining knowledge about most ideas. As an example, I was introduced to the author John Holt and the concept of unschooling through a website about learning Japanese. I’m now keenly interested in the subject and have read half a dozen books about it. But if the author of that Japanese website hadn’t written about it—a topic that is perhaps only tangentially related to learning Japanese—then I may never have encountered that idea.
Our exposure to different sources of information is an unpredictable organic process, and by adding my words to the mix I am expanding the number of avenues through which a person might arrive at the information they seek. And so I write.
2. It adds strength to the idea itself.
When I read something for the first time that really clicks with me, I often think that my mind is changed at that moment. I begin believing in this new idea at that time, and it’s like an irreversible chemical reaction. Or so I like to think. But in reality, belief comes in degrees. If someone asks me what I believe, I’ll come up with a list of items, and a distinction is drawn—something is either on the list, or not on the list. But when I am not consciously enumerating beliefs, they affect my thoughts and actions in very different ways. Some beliefs are so pervasive that they govern my daily habits, while others just sit in the back of my mind like a trophy on a shelf, of no real use until I have to bring it up in conversation.
I find that the beliefs that truly help to define my daily existence are the ones that I read about and discuss with others frequently. Having seen some changes in my beliefs recently, I can state fairly confidently that the causation flows from experience—reading or talking about an idea—to belief, and not the other way around. Furthermore, ideas gain strength when I get them from a greater variety of sources, especially when the sources are in different contexts.
By writing about an idea that I believe in, I am providing another source within the context of my blog that can reinforce that idea in a reader’s mind. Who knows, it may just be the tipping point that triggers someone to take action based on sufficient belief in that new idea. And so I write.
3. Every individual’s experience of an idea is unique.
I’m going to use a recent example from my life to explain this point. I recently started meditating and writing a brief journal entry, sporadically at first but more and more often until now I do it every single day. I did not come up with this idea on my own; I heard from a number of different people that it has been an overwhelmingly positive habit in their lives. These people were mostly friends, and I respected and trusted them, but I still had to hear the same message over and over again for about six months before I actually tried it myself.
A few months after I had established this habit, I started reading a book called The Willpower Instinct by psychologist Kelly McGonigal, which was recommended to me by my business ethics professor. The book approaches willpower from an evidence-based foundation, citing results from scientific studies to help explain the neurological underpinnings of willpower and how to go about improving it. Early in the book, the author states that meditation is one of the most effective practices to help improve functioning in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is basically where willpower originates. She goes on to recommend meditation as a foundation for anyone seeking to improve willpower.
It was pretty cool to read some scientific validation of a positive habit that I had recently started. But I can promise you, if I had read that book by itself, without hearing from other people about their experience with meditation, I would not have started the habit. I don’t think I’ve ever changed my habits based solely on something I read in a book, regardless of how convincingly it was presented.
The difference is that hearing about the actual experiences of my friends provided a rich context for the idea itself, and made it a lot easier to accept. I knew I had similar thoughts and behaviors as them, and so if meditation could make things better for them then it’s not much of a stretch to say it might help me as well. All this to say that perhaps the ideas I am writing about are not new or unique, but my experience of those ideas is absolutely unique. And if someone reading this blog relates to me because they have had similar experiences, then my words may do more to convey an idea to them than anyone else. And so I write.
School of Hard Knox 