We are weird creatures, we like to complicate our lives and overthink things.
If you try to verbalise all the accumulated thoughts, you’ll notice that you don’t understand yourself at all and you may feel like a hamster running in a spin wheel.
Paul Graham, a great investor and a founder of most famous startup accelerator Y Combinator, said that you should write as if you talked to a friend. Scott Adams, the author of a famous Dilbert blog also gives a similar advice:
Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.
Kuba and myself are quite a competitive person, hence our bet may work just fine. Namely; we decided to write down at least 200 words a day of our thoughts. We are ticking off our 200-word days in a newly created, shared Google calendar, so one can see other’s attempt in keeping the race.
Kuba is writing in a physical diary (I still love reading mines from when I was 7-10 years old), while I will continue on selecting and simplifying my thought process with help of this blog (damn you brain, stop creating long sentences!).
I made to my imaginary readers and myself a promise to write shorter articles, staying on one subject and using less sophisticated vocabulary. Who am I kidding at the end. Producing endless gabble won’t result in labelling me The Intelligent Person. Quite the contrary.
Nobody wants to start or join a conversation, when they can’t find an anchor point (note: also effective in business).
Simple choice drives action. The abundance of choice helps us to focus.
After running 3 relatively unrelated companies at the same time, having been through many high and lows, I can confirm that nothing speeds up growth as much as the clarity of mission. It’s ok you pivot as you build the company along, it’s important to explore ONE thought/idea at the time. E.g. IamIN is now all about solving problem of split travel payments for groups. We even narrowed our area to flights, built our typical persona it suddenly became much easier to find and target our market.
Hence the simple solution: Write.
The more you write, the more ideas come to your mind. Most of them won’t be any good, but it’s important to write them down and visualise your thoughts. Soon you will sharpen your idea selection process and it will take you less time to say the quintessence in less words.