bikes and things

I’ve tried to use this place as a reason to write slightly longer form discussions or ‘articles’ about things that interest me recently. My view of what this place is changes often but for the large part it’s a journal of sorts and a place to record thoughts and images. It seems like a good exercise to flex your brain slightly and construct a longer discussion, or series of thoughts, as opposed to the notes form I often create at work for the purposes of communicating information in a succinct way.

Thinking back to how I got better at photography, I only got better by doing more of it. Writing is clearly the same and MG Siegler has started writing 500 words a day for this very reason. The reason I’m blathering on about all of this is that I found a great article on Technovia this morning on the bus which spurred me into writing about it. Especially this quote from the article.

But there’s another reason to write, and I think for most people it’s the most important reason of all. Writing helps you understand yourself. It forces you to focus your thoughts and move them from the massively-parallel way that your mind works into a kind of linear order. The process of writing something down turns it from a fleeting thought into something much more concrete.

When you write for this reason, it doesn’t really matter if anyone else reads. What matters is that you have written something that’s more than a single thought.

It’s great to find articles like this and it’s the whole reason I still am a heavy user of RSS. I find things like this all the time when I’m in an idle moment. I’ve added the Technovia feed to my list of essentials in Reeder.