After these first few weeks of consistent writing, editing and thinking about the quality and depth of the content I’m creating, I noticed I lack one core skill in writing – clear and concise communication.

With a more consistent writing schedule and more topics in my mind, especially tricky ones, I noticed that instead of deciding on a specific idea I would like to communicate in a single post, I would meander around a topic and get sidetracked a lot, giving unrelated examples I think would be cool to add. But from the perspective of a reader, the idea, whether genuinely amazing and life-changing, or utter garbage, would get lost in the weeds.

I use the same type of communication when speaking. I meet with a friend and business partner twice weekly and he often would interrupt my chain of unrelated thoughts with a question: “Is this going somewhere, or are you just talking around a topic?” Usually – the latter.

I think Paul Graham’s essays are a good example on how to communicate difficult topics clearly and he recently wrote an essay on good writing with a point I should probably learn (and fast):

You can’t simultaneously optimize two unrelated things; when you push one far enough, you always end up sacrificing the other. And yet no matter how hard I push, I never find myself having to choose between the sentence that sounds best and the one that expresses an idea best. If I did, it would be frivolous to care how sentences sound. But in practice it feels the opposite of frivolous. Fixing sentences that sound bad seems to help get the ideas right.

When I was writing 3-4 years ago – my chain of posts regarding ego detachment, true self and dharma – were more of “I cannot not write the post” as I had some idea I wanted to spill out (release even?) into a post. I would not think about the idea I wanted to tell – most often it was just a glimpse of my thought stream at the time. Afterwards, I would nudge some sections around to get at least a semblance of structure, edit out grammar and style mistakes and be done with it.

This was a viable way of writing only when I was forced to (from the inside), but not so much as a daily consistent practice. A need for structure came into focus – I had to decide what I wanted to convey before I started writing.

And while the old way of writing – spilling out whatever I was thinking – felt authentic, raw and unfiltered, now I’m realizing that authenticity without clarity is something a reader can’t actually follow. The ideas get lost. And now I’m learning to hold both – keep the authenticity, but also shape it to become clear and understandable.

And more often than not, when I force myself to communicate better, I realise I wasn’t thinking clearly whatsoever – so that also benefits me on the reflection part of writing.

So one of my future goals in this writing morning practice is to become a better communicator, both in these weekly essays and when talking about my ideas and discussing topics. And now every morning when I’m writing, I aim to reread and keep asking – what is the idea I’m trying to convey? Can I explain it in one sentence? And if I can’t – perhaps I meandered in way too many things already – and I need to cut off parts of the text. And that is hard – but also the type of work that needs to be done.

But while we can’t safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it’s usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.

That’s what I’m learning: clarity isn’t just for the reader, it’s how I learn to see whether I’m thinking straight.