Writing

When you land on a site, you are treated with various hyperlinks. Based on the UX choices you make, you might end up preferring one over the other. You might get the job done, and head back to your earlier Chrome tab. Nothing out of the ordinary. It's an internet search as usual. But what about those pages which have no visible links on the site you just searched. It’s hidden in plain sight, but...

We lack frequent usage of the 'future past tense' in modern discourse. When I was recently writing some new year resolutions, I noticed the use of 'I can', and 'I will', and found myself questioning the format, especially when I see that I'm good at making promises, but was very bad at keeping them (atleast the new year resolutions). When we write "I achieved..." instead of "I will achieve..", we...

Writing for yourself on your personal website is the purest form of self-expression on the internet. It avoids any trappings from the algorithmic maze. And there are no digital echo chambers. It's just you and your ideas in your own cozy little garden. We're witnessing the renaissance of personal websites. As social platforms become increasingly unstable, more creators are rediscovering the power...

Writing is thinking. My blog has had a median of 0 visitors per day for almost two years (nowadays, it's only a marginal improvement). And I don't care. As Alexey Guzey points out, perhaps the best indicator of your online writing having benefits is when you are not too embarassed to tell people, "Oh, BTW, I wrote about this/collected some things on this topic on my blog", the purpose of your...

We have more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds, and books on ornithologists written by birds. Taleb eloquently describes this as the key problem of knowledge, or in other words as epistemic arrogance. Strong corollary can be drawn with various disciplines, including entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs simply spend more time doing entrepreneurship rather...

What differentiates a good essay and a bad essay? With a great essay, you can see the larger tree that connects all those branches, leaves, and twigs together into a single unit of a 'tree'. A bad essay is where you only see the random assortment of leaves and branches. You don't see the larger tree among the branches. While listening to one of the podcast episodes from David Perell's Writes of...

Strongly recommend everyone to keep private notes about people. These could even be some random jotted keywords: "served in the navy", "capuccino lover", "biker", "loves going on long walks", and so on. When private notes accumulate over time in the form of a database, they start showing emergent properties. As Derek Sivers rightly points out in his essay: having your own database is one of the...

Zettels are the best way to connect and preserve ideas. I've tried various tools and systems for online writing, but nothing beats the power of Zettels. What are they, really? They come from the Zettelkasten method, developed by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who was incredibly prolific. He wrote around 70 books and 400 peer-reviewed articles in 30 years. That's a lot of writing. How did he...

Not starting with a blank slate has been a great productivity boost in my writing. I wrote 50K words in 2024. And I can safely say that these 50K words have been written in a well thought manner, instead of an AI generated word salad. All this, because I've been exploring this neat little plugin called as Smart Connections on Obsidian. It is a tool, and I wouldn't be naive enough to say that...

While designing health campaigns for Noora Health's work in Indonesia and Bangladesh, I was overseeing the health communications strategy for pregnant and newly-delivered mothers. There were messages in a specific format that needed to be rewritten in a more easy to digest Whatsapp format appealing to the people of Bangladesh. My usual default response to such tasks would be to open a tab on...

Take a small block of paragraph and sprinkle 8-10 hyperlinks in it— Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec tristique elit sit amet diam fringilla posuere sodales a leo. Cras auctor efficitur purus in suscipit. Sed ornare lectus at nisl dictum semper. Donec efficitur lorem in nisi dapibus condimentum. Ut ex tortor, aliquam at facilisis vitae, porttitor maximus sapien. Duis...

In the classic Turing Test, a computer is considered intelligent if it can convince a human that it’s another human in a conversation. At that time, human-generated content dominated the internet. But that was a decade ago. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically. AI-generated content now rivals, and in some cases outpaces, human-created material. According to the 'expanding dark forest'...

Initially popularised by McKinsey consultants to draft internal reports, this became quite widespread as a global standard for business writing. Start with the main statement, draw some conclusions and provide some data/facts and figures for further understanding. This could be a simple way in which most Slack updates could be arranged as the format prevents us from becoming too verbose. Not just...