From March until late September of this year the amount of time I was able to spend on reading, writing, and coding sharply increased. In September, I moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. The surplus time that I had to put towards my individual interests instantly decreased when I arrived. Since the change in time allocation, I have noticed one particular shift in how I do spend the free time: I write one quarter of what I used to.
Writing less isn’t inherently concerning. I imagine that most people don’t write very frequently in their spare time, but I set an explicit goal to write 20,000 words by Christmas in an attempt to become a better writer. The idea stems from the advice of Patrick McKenzie whose career is bound to his ability to effectively communicate through his writing. McKenzie advises those who aim to improve their writing ability to write one million words. It’s a Gladwellian piece of “do X a lot and you’ll get better at it” advice, but instead of reading 300 pages I only had to read a Twitter thread. While I don’t know that my future job will be inseparable from my writing ability, I would at least like my emails to make sense and receive timely responses. That desire was enough to convince me that I should take McKenzie’s advice and throttle the number of words I write.
What came as a surprise to me as I undertook that goal is just how easy it was to write a lot. Week after week I would sit down behind my computer and drum up ideas in Microsoft Word. Writing during March to September was a rhetorical game of connect the dots. With each additional book and article I read, a new set of dots was added to the amalgamation of potential connections. The similarity of ideas between works that were ostensibly worlds apart in subject matter began to reveal itself. During every single book I found myself thinking “I just read that sentiment in X.” I slowly realized that the only thing preventing me from writing 500 words juxtaposing an idea in Robinson Crusoe and an anecdote from The Origin of Species is that I’ve read one and not the other.
Then came September. I began my current job which is tremendously enjoyable but curtails my ability to learn at my own pace during Monday through Friday. The number of books I read shifted from two per week to two per month. In addition to making me much more judicious about what I decide to spend my time reading, the frequency with which I write has decreased greatly. It is not that my ideas are of a different quality, but the number of ideas I am able to explain is being exhausted. There seems to be a numerator-heavy ratio of words I read to ideas I can explain. The ratio, let’s say its 100 words read to every one word written is manageable when I’m taking in 200,000 words per week. When that word intake drops to 50,000 it is unsurprising that it will take far longer to string together the ideas I was quickly finding before.
The near term goal of writing 20,000 words, and the medium term goal of writing 1,000,000, has an implied co-requisite: collect enough mental inputs to make those words interesting to write and learn an exponentially higher amount of information than the amount that I aim to produce. If my personal ratio of read-to-written words is in fact 100-to-1, I will need to read at least 100,000,000 words (or whatever the converted units of listening and experience are) in order to garner enough ideas to fill 1,000,000 written words. The task of inputing information is equally important as the action of creating the output.
The writer and musician Ted Gioia was a guest on the podcast Conversations With Tyler in 2019. The host, Tyler Cowen, likes to ask his guests about their “production function.” By production function he means whatever action, no matter how trivial it seems, that enable the individual to have been successful in whatever his or her specialization is. Gioia responded with the following statement:
In your life, you will be evaluated on your output. Your boss will evaluate you on your output. If you’re a writer like me, the audience will evaluate you on your output.
But your input is just as important. If you don’t have good input, you cannot maintain good output. The problem is no one manages your input. The boss never cares about your input. The boss doesn’t care about what books you read. Your boss doesn’t ask you what newspapers you read. The boss doesn’t ask you what movies you saw or what TV shows or what ideas you consumed.
But I know for a fact, I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. That’s why I spend maybe two hours a day writing. I’m a writer. I spend two hours a day writing, but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music.
People think that that’s creating a problem in my schedule, but in fact, I say, “No, no, this is the reason why I’m able to do this. Because I have constant good-quality input.” That is the only reason why I can maintain the output.
The idea that quality inputs are a requirement to continue producing new ideas in writing is the most intuitive but important idea I've internalized this year. Unfortunately, internalizing the importance of quality inputs does not solve the problem of limited time. The necessity of finding new ideas to learn doesn't give me an extra hour per day with which to learn them. What it does contribute is a justification for the reallocation of limited time to learning that I previously would have said "causes a problem in my schedule." These inputs are an essential part of my goal and thus must be allowed for or the goal should be abandoned.
