On Writing

My peers and teachers have always known me as a good writer. In school, my grades displayed this to all around me. But I had no idea what I was doing.

Ever since I can remember I hated school even though I was an excellent student. I found school to be absent of individual freedom and creativity. School held me back from pursuing my passions to their fullest extent.

Excelling in school, I was simply a master at playing the educational game of achieving highly with little to no effort. And for this reason, I had no incentive to improve. My good enough was excellent. I was able to barf words into an essay in less than an hour and receive the highest grade possible. I was awarded for being complacent.

I was great at following a rubric, but didn’t understand how to write.

Now, I have always loved ideas. Especially, when I began to see the influence they had on my life. Tim Ferriss eloquently states that “philosophy (ideas) is an operating system for making better decisions in life.” As a teenager, the more I thought about myself and the world around me, the more my life improved. My self-esteem increased in proportion to my self-awareness.

This stemmed from thinking critically about my life in the form of writing. The benefits that came from this grew my desire to write and understand the world. I had a burning desire to learn and improve; no one was telling me to write for a grade and I loved it. Because I wanted to write, I quickly improved and retained the knowledge I gained versus losing it after the test.

And, I improved my writing by writing. I like to funnily say that I learned to write by writing a book, but seriously I did. It was the desire to share my understanding with others in order to improve their lives that pushed me to write. This is my goal for what I’m writing now.

Putting my education into my own hands has granted me an education full of learning. Again, something I can’t say about school. It took me nineteen years of being a “good” writer to understand when to start a new paragraph, why to cut the fat off of my writing, or the difference between effect and affect or there, their, and they’re.

Moreso, I had to learn how to write for an audience. Ideas must be explained thoroughly and of interest to the audience to be of any value. Through writing, I am learning to sell, not by majoring in marketing, but by having something that I want people to know.

And finally, learning to actually write has improved my cognitive ability more than school ever had. Writing is thinking! Today, I am comfortable in new, cognitively difficult situations. My cognitive ability is the best it has ever been, and as my cognitive competence increases so does my confidence. Once I put my education into my own hands, my world expanded beyond what I could have imagined prior.