S-Tier Skills: Writing

Writing is a powerful skill.

Mightier is he who wields a pen than he who wields a sword.

There are men who have permanently altered the course of human history with the ideas they wrote down. All of the progress of humanity, the structure of society, the affairs of nations, and the way the world is, have been shaped by the writings of men who died hundreds of years ago, some who had died thousands of years before. Even as their bones decay and their flesh decomposes, they live on through the ideas they crafted.

Adam Smith for example, and many of the other early economic thinkers, have laid the foundations of capitalism, which is essentially a set of ideas and beliefs that inform how individuals, firms, and nations interact with each other. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are prolific in their contributions to philosophy, mathematics, science, and the political theories which gave way to western civilization. It is these ideas that have ordered the actions of billions of people over thousands of years to where we are today.

Clearly, ideas are powerful. They shape reality. And what more is writing than the refining and articulation of an idea?

It can be argued then, that good writing leads to good ideas. And good ideas lead to good outcomes.

The reverse is also true however. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in the Gulag Archipelago, "Ideology is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination."

So writing then, is a tool that can be used for great evil just as much as it is used for great good. How then should one use such a powerful tool?

That's a deep question that I've yet to develop an answer for, but writing about it is a good first step.

Writing is a meta-skill. If you can get good at writing, you can get good at most other skills.