I've been meaning to start a blog for about 10 years, and this article broke the camel's back.  TL;DR: Researcher/Enthusiast wrote a long essay about the viability of airships (I stumbled into an obsession with airships last year, which is how I found this author).  A fellow airship enthusiast and SpaceX engineer found the essay, and starting running the numbers.  The SpaceX engineer found that Airships could be more viable than the essay thought (because the essay didn't do enough logistics research), and eventually this led him to start an airship company.  The author of the original essay is now an investor in this new company and everyone is very happy.

What an idea!  An essay created a company!  It's like Amazon's six-page PRFAQ, Stanislaw Lem writing fictional book reviews of books he didn't have time to write, Y Combinator's Request for Startup, and when weird XKCD fans implement comics.  If you want something to exist, describe it to the world. Speak it into existence.

I've collected a few articles that inspired me to write. You should read them.

If you read all of those and you still aren't convinced, I have more spiel to unspool.

"You can't think without writing" is a happily-repeated meme that I strongly believe, but this is how I think of it: writing is walking in the light. My bad, old, circular, muddled thoughts are cozy and fat as long as they're only in my head. As they take form in front of me, and I imagine the reader, they are refined by fire. This happens to me at least once a week at work. I launch into a triumphant, well-reasoned explanation for why something happened or how something works, and halfway through I realize I have no idea what I'm talking about. Sometimes, I get only about 15 words in. Some questions that pop up are:

  • "Would even 5 minutes of research show this to be false?"
  • "Oh hey, I understand the problem now! I can just build/fix the thing and delete all of this!"
  • "This is too complicated and it's dancing around the issue."
  • "This thought ends right as it was getting interesting."
  • "This long Latin word is posturing and it is canned thought."
  • "Omit needless words."

Sometimes silly ideas survive the process anyway, and then one of my thoughtful, thorough co-workers picks apart what I missed. And I feel silly that I made them waste their time poking holes in my thinking. But I still win! I would never know I was wrong unless I was wrong on the internet first.

Think of all the companies that don't exist because you're too timid and lazy to publish! You monster. How do you sleep at night?