On Writing
And why I started this Blog
I think I always loved to write. On the working side, I’m the type of person that prefers a good and clean email or text message, instead of an audio recording or a phone call (there are exceptions of course). In my private life, I keep a sporadic journal that helps me during the most stressful periods.
Recently though I realised one thing: writing is actually one of the only things I like to do for their own sake. Everything else I do in my day is a for-profit activity, whether it’s my full time job or my crypto-related startup. The fact that I’m in those things for the money doesn’t make them bad (more on this concept in a future post) but you can definitely feel the difference in your mental state, when you do something without any monetary goal in mind. It’s kind of liberating and peaceful, so I decided to do it more often.
Writing has its obvious benefits. Many see it as a form of meditation, and bringing a journaling routine in your life will definitely help you anchor on a nice habit and build a healthy routine. Even more importantly, I see writing as a way of forcing my thoughts into a nicer form. Clear thoughts are necessary in order to write, but I also think the opposite is true: writing helps cleaning and polishing your thoughts and ultimately your mind. We live in a constant flow of ideas and stimuli, and being able to structure our own ideas into a concise and understandable form is a tremendous skill that will become more and more useful as the rate of information from the outside rises (and it will).
At this point you could ask me: so why publishing this little blog? Isn’t it enough to write for yourself?
The answer is two-faced. On the first side, having to publish my writing increases the pressure coming from it, in a good way. When writing for myself I can be imprecise on some parts, but if I know that piece of content will be potentially out for years, and seen by many people, it will force me to sharpen my ideas even more and go the extra mile to make sure my thinking is as clearly structured as possible (without becoming a perfectionist, of course).
On the other side, the answer comes from understanding what is one of the common denominators of all the things i love doing, which is taking new pragmatic ideas and try to turn them into realities (more on this in a future post).
New ideas don’t fall from the sky, but (in my experience) usually come from the intersection of two or more thoughts that seemed disconnected before. Many of the visionary companies and industries we all know were born from this process:
Human crave for social interactions + internet = Social Networks (E.g. Facebook)
30 years old encryption algorithms + intolerance for centralised financial systems = Bitcoin
So if I want to spend my days thinking on new ideas, I need to create more connections. I like to read non-fiction books, they’re a great source of insights into the minds of other enlightened people and companies. But another (maybe more) powerful way of stimulating my mind is talking to people. We’re in the middle of a digital revolution, but I think all the nice things I’ve achieved so far in life came from a connection with another human being.
So if I can leverage something that’s already a passion of mine (writing) to expand the reach of my thoughts and make it easy for other people to know my ideas and get in contact with me, I’m definitely going for it. I plan on using this space as a living folder for my thoughts and my views of the sectors I’m most passionate of (currently Web3 & mindfulness/clear thinking). If it will attract even just 10 more people interested in having a conversation with me I’ll consider it a huge win.
It’s called “Curated Thinking” because, as the name implies, I’ll do my best to make sure only distilled and well thought ideas fall into this publication. I won’t post super frequently, and I’ll probably share some new version of old posts if I think I could explain my ideas in a better way (or if I changed my mind). Even though I have absolutely nothing against daily newsletters (I’m a happy subscriber in a few of them) for this little project I’ll value quality over quantity.
I hope you’ll gain some useful insight from this substack. If so, let’s get in touch: riccardo@caneve.it
