Writing in Private
Writing is an important tool for personal development even if you never intend to share your work with others.
“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
— Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book
Communication is an essential skill which is why so much time and energy is spent to teach children how to express themselves verbally and in writing. How else can we convey our thoughts and ideas to others?
The communication revolution of the past three decades started by making it possible for anyone to reach large audiences through writing. By the 2010s, plentiful bandwidth and mobile devices made video communication cheap and effective. Today, anyone with an internet connection can share ideas in a variety of formats. The field is crowded because there are no barriers to entry, but this also creates optionality for enterprising people. Being “discovered” is a very real possibility even in a crowded landscape.
The potential rewards of breaking through online has focused a great deal of attention on writing for public consumption. The bar for presenting ideas to the public should be high. On more than one occasion, I can recall sitting down to write about a topic and struggling to make progress. Usually, this meant that I either lacked underlying knowledge of the subject or had failed to spend enough time to come up with a defensible opinion. Having writer’s block is a signal to do more work or, perhaps more often, take a long walk to just think through an issue to the point where it can be explained to others.
But knowing what you want to express is just the starting point when it comes to writing in public, or at least it should be the starting point. The first draft of an idea usually exposes gaping holes that must be filled, and even when all the substance is there, what seems clear to the author might not be clear to the reader. Good writing, especially in the age of artificial intelligence, also has to embody a certain human style in order to be compelling. This does not come naturally to most writers. The bottom line is that writing in public involves many steps beyond knowing the topic and what you want to communicate.
I have published articles at slower cadence in 2025 than in recent years, but this only represents writing that I have shared in public. I have written far more in private than in prior years and simply made the decision to not hit the publish button as often. I cannot think of a single day this year when I have not spent at least half an hour writing, and on many days I write for several hours. Nearly all of this writing involves using a pen and a notebook. I have found that most of the benefits of writing in public extend to writing privately. I am forced to think through subjects more carefully and often discover that I do not really understand what I am writing about. This results in additional reading or contemplation.
Why have I chosen to write more in private? The main reason is that I have been spending much more time on my Great Books reading project and less time analyzing companies and investment opportunities. I find it much easier to write about investing, which is within my circle of competence, compared to the classics where I often feel like a total amateur. In 2024, I published many articles about the Great Books and each one took a great deal of time and effort, far beyond the point at which I felt like I understood the material.
Once you have built up a sizable audience, it can be intimidating to publish articles. This has become more of a psychological impediment with the increasing popularity of Substack and other platforms that automatically send emails to subscribers. In the old days of blogging, a writer could put something up on the internet and readers would have to find their way to the material. Today, publishing seems inherently more intrusive due to email distribution. When your email list represents nearly 20,000 people and you know that half of the recipients will actually open the email, the bar should be high before publishing.
Mortimer Adler emphasized that reading should not be a passive activity. At least for any book worth studying in detail, the reader needs to actively engage with the author. This can start with writing in the book itself, an act that many find objectionable but has the beneficial effect of putting the reader in direct communication with the writer. In the course of marking up a book, the reader starts to formulate his or her own ideas based on the subject the author is writing about. I find it very helpful to extend this practice to writing journal entries after a reading session. This does not need to take any specific form, but I prefer pen and paper to writing on a computer since there are zero distractions if electronics are out of the picture.
I have found time to do more meaningful writing in private by abandoning my old morning pages routine and doing more focused writing first thing in the morning. Over the past few years, I have started the day with some type of daily reading, usually from the Bible but also from notable thinkers like Leo Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, and Timothy Keller who published material that can now be found in “daily reading” formats. Last year, I filled a two hundred page notebook based on observations from reading the ESV Study Bible. Each entry required about thirty to forty-five minutes and often revealed gaping holes in my understanding.
In addition to this morning routine, I have another notebook for writing about my Great Books reading project. I have filled several notebooks with entries covering each of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, in addition to entries about writings by Plato and Xenophon. It took about an hour or two to write a few pages about each of the plays. This helped solidify the plot in my mind and has been a useful reference. Just the other day, I read a reference to Hippolytus and only vaguely recalled reading the play by Euripides. My journal entry took a few minutes to read and fully refreshed my memory.
Writing about each of the plays of Ancient Greece for public consumption would require far more time than writing in private. I know this because I did write a few such articles in 2024, including one on The Oresteia that took a couple of days to complete. While the article may have added value for readers, and perhaps some people went on to read the trilogy for themselves, I am sure that my analysis and commentary was amateurish given that I am not a classicist or in any way specially qualified to write on the topic!
In contrast, I can write rapidly and (hopefully) provide value when it comes to topics squarely in my circle of competence. For example, I recently wrote about Berkshire Hathaway’s 2025 proxy statement. I maintain a spreadsheet that I was updating anyway for my own use and it only took a couple of hours to write the article. If it had required two days of effort rather than two hours, I would not have published the article.
The problem with writing about investments in public is that it comes with undesirable baggage. Several years ago, I wrote about the negative effects of such writing. For the most part, the problem comes down to human psychology. When you write about an investment idea in public, it becomes more difficult to change your mind when circumstances change that might invalidate your original thesis. In addition, giving away ideas in a competitive world is not exactly a brilliant idea, particularly in the small cap world.
What’s the point of publishing this article?
It is important to write whether the goal is to publish or not. The benefits of writing are so great that it is folly to fail to do so simply because you might not aspire to write for others. Reading widely is a prerequisite for wisdom, as Charlie Munger so often said, but it is important to read well which means reading actively.
Prior to 2015, when I was first exposed to Mortimer Adler’s ideas, I read passively and never marked up books except when I planned to write book reviews. When I look back at my reading log for earlier years, I recognize the books but often cannot remember much about them. From 2015 to 2019, I read more actively but did not actively write privately in journals, so I recall more of what I read but there are still many holes in my memory. Since 2020, I have a far better recollection of my reading and I think that I have been able to synthesize more ideas across books.
No technology is needed to start writing beyond a pen and paper, but few people seem to bother with this practice. In a competitive world, this is a good way to gain an advantage over your peers.
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