Write to Think
Make the invisible visible so you can find where your thinking breaks
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 89%
Parrish's mechanism is externalisation. Thoughts in your head cannot be inspected, so you cannot see where they are weak, play with them, or test how they interact with other ideas — you end up running mental games that convince you of things you do not actually believe. Putting them on the page makes the invisible visible, at which point the gaps become obvious. The process is generative as well as diagnostic: refining an idea in writing produces new ones. It also teaches a specific humility. You will have a paragraph with a great opening sentence that simply does not work, and you have to delete it — literally removing something from your mind rather than defending it. This is precisely the faculty an AI-written draft removes, which is why Parrish lets his kids feed an essay to a model to find weak points, but not to write it.
Origin
Parrish began the practice on his anonymous blog while at the intelligence agency, unable to have any public profile. It was an online journal to chronicle his learning: take notes, connect ideas, synthesise them, compress them — which, he says, is the act of reflection.
Core principles
- 01Writing is the process by which you discover you do not understand something.
- 02You are not writing down what you think; you are writing in order to think.
- 03Ideas stay unfalsifiable while they are in your head, because you cannot see them.
- 04Writing generates new ideas, it does not merely record existing ones.
- 05Deleting an idea you are attached to is the humility the process teaches.
- 06Outsourcing the draft outsources the thinking that the draft was for.
How to run it
- 1
Write the idea out in prose
Take a decision you are making or an idea you are wrestling with and write it in full sentences. Bullets hide the joins where the reasoning fails.
- 2
Find where you stop understanding
Read for the point at which the argument no longer follows. That break is the actual location of your misunderstanding.
Pro tip The discomfort of not being able to finish a sentence is the signal, not an obstacle.
- 3
Delete what will not work
When a passage cannot be made to make sense, cut it rather than forcing it. Giving up on a favoured idea is the point of the exercise.
Watch out Attachment to a good opening line is the most common reason a broken argument survives a draft.
- 4
Connect, synthesise, compress
Link the idea to what you already know, condense it, and see whether it still holds at a shorter length. This is where reflection actually happens.
- 5
Use AI as a critic, never as an author
Feed your finished draft to a model and ask where the weak points are. Never ask it to produce the draft, because the draft was the thinking.
Watch out If the source material was generated by a model, there is no thinking of yours left to examine.
- 6
Keep the archive and reread it
Revisit old writing periodically. Seeing how wrong or shallow you once were is the clearest available evidence that you have grown.
Pro tip Ferriss uses his weekly newsletter as his diary and can revisit any given week years later.
In the wild
Working at an intelligence agency, Parrish was forbidden any public profile — no LinkedIn, no social presence, nothing discoverable. He nonetheless started an online journal at a URL made from Berkshire Hathaway's zip code and Kiewit Plaza unit number, purely to chronicle his own learning: take notes, connect ideas, synthesise, compress. He was writing to think, with no audience in mind. It reached roughly 25,000 readers before he renamed it Farnam Street.
→ A private thinking practice that became the foundation of his entire body of work.
Parrish's children insert variables into a chatbot and receive a finished essay, asking why they would write when the machine will do it and the grade will be fine. His rule permits one use and forbids the other: you may feed it your essay and ask where the weak points are, but you may not have it write the essay. Ferriss's reason is direct — you cannot examine your own thinking when the source material was not produced by you.
→ A workable AI policy that keeps the diagnostic value of writing while using the tool as a critic.
Common mistakes
Treating writing as transcription
If you believe you are only recording finished thoughts, you will stop the moment it gets hard, which is exactly where the thinking begins.
Forcing an idea you are attached to
Keeping a passage because the opening sentence is good preserves the flaw the writing was supposed to expose.
Letting a model produce the draft
Generated source material leaves you nothing of your own to cross-examine, and the faculty atrophies the way navigation did after Google Maps.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone who thinks for a living and wants to find the holes in their reasoning before reality does.
Not ideal for
Purely tacit or physical skills where the learning is in repetition rather than articulation.
From the transcript
“writing is the process by which we realize we don't understand what we're talking about”
“you're not writing down what you think you're writing in order to think”
“you have all these thoughts right and you're making the invisible visible and by making the invisible visible now I can see it”
From the episode
#695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More