Writing down conversations

December 19th, 2019

When I first started blogging, I wondered: “What am I going to write that hasn’t been written already?” What I’ve learned is that writing down my thoughts helps immensely in remembering, clarifying and even extending them. Of late, I occasionally get coffee with people in my network who might have questions about my experiences. These conversations will often go on for an hour and while they are often subtle recruiting pitches, that doesn’t stop them from being interesting. In particular, the questions they ask are often as revealing as the answers I give…how someone thinks about a problem, what parts are generally solveable, what seems like my personal bias.

I also feel like my conversational skills have been flagging lately. Too much time writing code and not enough time engaging in meaningful dialogue and most damagingly, almost no time spent on composing rhetoric. Dialogue and rhetoric seem like they would pair so nicely together. Coming together, we pollinate each other with new ideas. But separating, we are able to incorporate new ideas into a holistic system of thought, instead of just being CNN talking heads.

This seems like good practice worth aspiring.