Lesson: Decision Making & Happiness with Kevin Fishner

Step #9 Thinking: Writing may allow you to better understand your own thoughts

Spatial thinkers, I don't know if you remember the standardized tests in middle school and elementary school, and I don't even know if they do this anymore, but part of it was rotating objects and if you see this weird square and you rotate it 90 degrees what would it look like on the other side. That's what I do for combining ideas in different ways.

If you think about an idea about design or an idea about product development and coding, they're kind of these spatial objects that then get combined. I don't know how other people think, if it's with words or colors. Writing is certainly a form of mind mapping where you write out a thesis statement and supporting facts and then you're really just embellishing the next paragraph. So it's taking mind mapping to a little bit more granular detail, which certainly doesn't need to be done for everybody. The further down in the details that you get, I find the better you understand the full subject.

The reason that I write every day is because I'm a spatial thinker, so when I'm putting ideas together mentally it's usually in kind of a grid. By writing something down, I take that spatial representation of ideas and put it in a way that I can actually express it to somebody. When I'm talking to you about why I write, it's difficult to explain because I think about it graphically, but writing it down makes it easier to communicate to others. So there's no value in having a good idea in your mind if you can't express it properly.

This is true with the best professors, the best professor isn't necessarily the smartest one. It's the one who can explain something in a way that's consumable for students. So this is the approach I take to writing. It's how can I take what I think is a good idea and write it down and express it in a way that can be consumed by others. What this does is when I'm trying to generate new ideas, I generate new ideas for other people so if it can't be understood then it's pretty much worthless, and it's true for products.

We see these amazingly complex products come out where you can solve every issue that you have and they're crazy. You need to be able to express something for the person receiving it. Writing is a skill set that allows you to improve that, and the more you write the better you get at it.

It's also a cathartic experience, so if you're worried about a certain idea or you're worried about a certain event in your life, writing it down is a way to almost communicate with somebody else without sharing your secrets or being worried about what someone would think about you. So it's a way to get personal feedback with yourself.

One hundred percent of my writing is for processing ideas, and I would say I share maybe 10% of it and the other 90% is kept privately, but there's no reason for that. It could be shared. Usually the ideas aren't thought out well enough to have someone else understand them in an easy way, so they certainly could be shared in the future, I just need to keep working on the idea and improving it so it could be consumed by somebody else.