Howard Marks started writing his famous memos by hand in the early 1990’s. For 10 years, he never received one response. He claims nobody even responded to let them know they got the letters. For my younger audience, pre-internet everything was sent by this service known as mail.

The answer I think is that I was writing for myself. Number one, it’s creative, I enjoy the writing process. Number two I thought that the topics were interesting and that I wanted to put them on paper. Number three, writing makes you tighten up your thinking. – Marks on Writing

Why did he do it? Marks has stated he was writing for himself, enjoyed having a creative outlet, and wanted to create a record of his thoughts. The more things change, the more they stay they same, as a lot of writers I read list the very same reasons for writing. It’s also the reason I’ve tried to write more and I think “writing for yourself” is under appreciated.

I was reminded of this by Cal Newports’s recent appearance on Ted Ferris to promote his new book “Slow Productivity”. In this clip, Cal emphasizes that the only thing that matters is loving the craft. Apply it, develop it, hone it, and find meaning in it. My favorite line is “don’t require random people on social media or an attention algorithm suck all of that skill out of you.”

Investing is my favorite craft, it has been for the last 10 years. I found it effortless to finish books on Munger, Marks, Schwarzman, KKR, etc…  or spend time thinking about companies and thesis building. Writing brings me the same joy, but I never practiced as much because I let the lack of response suck the life out of me. Don’t do that.

As you can tell, I write a lot about failure, writing, and process. I do so because they are all intricately tied together. We learn from failure and process it to take calculated risks and prevent ourselves from making the same mistake twice. We write to process what we’ve learned both in theory and in practice. We refine our processes and learn to enjoy them because they’re usually all we can control.

Writing also puts our instincts to the test. Putting our thoughts down forces us to look at the word as a reader will see them, unaided by our frameworks, biases, or instincts. It hard to overstate how important that feels in an industry where distinguishing what I want to be true from what’s really true determines success.

Investors leverage many tools to make sense of the world – spreadsheets, pitch decks, expert interviews – but few exercises force us to clarify and tighten up our thinking like writing.