The Best Writing Comes From Connections

Why Rewilding Alone Is Insufficient For Deep Writing

This is a bit of an older article that I originally intended to publish shortly after Medium day. But it’s still relevant today.

Medium day has come and gone and in it there have been a lot of talks. But there is one talk in particular that I keep on thinking about. The talk is from Clive Thompson and is titled ‘Rewilding Your Attention’. Rewilding is a term from conservation. It is about taking areas that are very artificial and ‘man-made’ and giving them back to nature. Making them wild again. Clive Thompson’s talk is about rewilding but instead of nature conservation it’s about your information diet. So instead of infinitely scrolling you read content from various sources. He talks about methods to do so here.

Now I don’t disagree that rewilding is beneficial. Obviously if you didn’t keep up with the latest news what you can write about is much more limited. But I don’t agree that rewilding is the be-all and end-all. In the talk Thompson talks about how if you don’t rewild your thinking is not going to be very diverse. You’ll be saying the same thing as what everyone else is saying. And the implication (although he never directly says it) is that if you do rewild your attention this won’t be the case.

And Thompson isn’t the only person that thinks like this. There was another talk by Enrique Dans titled ‘How To Succeed As An Academic On Medium’. I mentioned this in another post but it’s a pretty misleading title for a talk. It mostly talks about research.

There seems to be this belief that if you just research enough then the perfect topic will just fall fully-formed into your lap. Research is important, yes, but you shouldn’t over-rely on it. And in fact research is probably not even the most important aspect in writing. Because the best writing does not come from research, it comes from connections.

Why Should I Care?

There’s another post I was thinking of writing titled, “I’m Tired Of Your One Trick Ponies” which is more of a rant about all the poor writing I’ve seen on Medium and elsewhere. I call these stories ‘one trick ponies’ because they mostly only focus on one topic. Maybe they have some sort of implication but it’s always very brief. The majority of the article is spent talking about the article’s one trick.

When I see one of these articles I just get so mad. Because it’s a wasted opportunity. You could have said something useful but you didn’t. Although my cynical side often wonders if they did it on purpose. They watered down their message to get more engagement.

I don’t know, but what I do know is that these articles are incredibly dull to read. They’re as if AI wrote it, but at least with AI you can identify that it’s AI and skip reading.

When I’m reading a story there’s one question going through my mind: “Why Should I Care?” Is there something that I can take away from this writing to better my life in some way? Now if you just write about a single topic without making any connections that’s very difficult to do. Because I could go to any number of different blogs and get the same information. But if you layer in connections then that’s like predigesting the information. And that delivers value.

What Is A Connection

One of my recent posts that I’m very proud of is this post on Googles Web Environment Integrity API. There are a lot of voices saying how this is bad but I leveraged my knowledge of existing web integrity solutions like Recaptcha v3 and delivered a post arguing that it’s not actually a bad thing. This is what I mean by a connection. I’m connecting Google’s new API to my existing knowledge of Recaptcha to deliver something new. Something that conveys value.

Now how do you do this? Build your own mobile app? Please, no, no more mobile apps, we have enough of them and I don’t want any more competition. And there are other ways of generating connections. A lot of us have some relevant experience that we simply forgot about. Like this post on remote work:

Take the stful and stlss keyboard shortcuts in Flutter. These are the shortcuts to automatically generate an empty Widget, something that needs a little bit of boilerplate to do. And one of Flutter’s taglines is ‘everything is a Widget’ so widgets are pretty important. What if you did not know about these keyboard shortcuts? And then one day someone told you. That could completely change how productive you are. I should know. I originally did not know these shortcuts so I avoided making new widgets whenever possible. But now that I know these shortcuts I’m not afraid of making widgets anymore. It was a gamechanger in my productivity.

This is in the context of serendipity and how it improves productivity. And when I thought of this example I was pretty excited. And it’s not that complicated of an example. I bet loads of Flutter developers have the exact same story, the only difference I had here is I put the puzzle pieces together.

So how did I do this? Just think deeply about what you’re writing about. Think the classic questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How? Who benefits from this? What are the benefits? When do they happen? Where do they occur? Why do they happen? And how do they happen?

When Personal Connections Are Not Enough

Now, of course, you can’t do this forever. Eventually you will run out of things to write about. That’s when you need research. Now I realize that the central thesis of this post is that rewilding alone is not enough and you need connections. But one could say that rewilding your attention is also a great way to build connections. Yes it is, but making connections from people’s random musings is not a great way of making connections because you weren’t there, you won’t have first-hand experience and so it will be much harder to put the pieces together.

Rewilding your brain can be a starting point but don’t expect anything more than that. And the connections I find by research are things everyone’s already talking about. Like I wrote a piece about how Twitter and Reddit are symptoms of a much larger problem which I call the ‘scrapening’. Anyone could have written this. Twitter and Reddit’s weird API decisions are everywhere. You’re not going to find anything interesting from an obscure blog that posts once a month. The good stuff is from the giant blogs because they pump out the most information.

But then you may ask, “Can’t rewilding help me research?” Yes, it can. But unfortunately rewilding your information is a pretty poor way of research. There is actually a way better way: AI. ChatGPT has been a complete gamechanger in my writing. Because I can use it to bounce ideas off of. So for that remote work post I wrote about. I originally only wanted to talk about serendipity, so I asked my research assistant ChatGPT what it thought about serendipity. And it told me that serendipity is related to another concept called the ‘water cooler effect’. And after even more prodding it talked about the power of weak ties.

Now everyone has heard about weak ties. But not everyone has heard of the water cooler effect. And going from serendipity to the watercooler effect to the power of weak ties is a bit of a stretch.

This is the power of ChatGPT. Now if you had read a few posts about remote work and serendipity you could have also come up with this on your own. But to have it just one or two prompts away? This is the future.

And when you do have the key phrases ‘watercooler effect’ and ‘weak ties’ it’s much easier to research. You can plug those terms into a search engine and get really good results. Not the random SEO garbage you would get if you just plugged in ‘serendipity’ into Google.

It’s like that phrase ‘garbage in garbage out’. If you start writing with poor quality information chances are what you’re going to get out is also poor quality. The way around this is to build connections. So you’re not just relying on one data point to write an article on. That’s boring, no one wants to read that.

What people want to read is a post that is well researched and well reasoned. One that makes them think and one that is memorable. And if you think about the things that make you think and you remember it’s not the people that talk about one thing. It’s the people that go from one topic to another and form a story around it. A narrative. A connection.

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