What writing three books taught me about thinking
Writing forces you to have a position. The act of explaining something to someone else is how you find out if you understand it.
I’ve written three books in three years. People ask how I found the time. The honest answer: I wrote when I didn’t have time, because writing is how I think, not how I record thoughts I already have.
The first draft of any chapter is me discovering what I actually believe. The second draft is me finding out how wrong I was in the first draft. The third draft is the one I let people read.
The books have made me a better investor and a better builder. Not because writing is virtuous — it’s not — but because you can’t write a chapter about unit economics without interrogating every unit economics decision you’ve ever made.
The thing I didn’t expect: readers push back. Founders email me with counterexamples. Three of those counterexamples changed positions I held for years.
Writing is the highest-bandwidth way I know to have a conversation with the ten thousand people I’ll never meet in a coffee shop.