Stoa Digest #50: 🖋Writing - A superpower.

The underdog that is worthy of being a king. 👑

May 30, 2022

This week’s editorial is by the team.

Can you hone a superpower?

With the way tech has advanced, one of the highest leverage skills you can hone, is writing. Oxymoronic? Let us explain.

Being a Stoan we’re sure you’ve heard the words, “Proof of Work” multiple times over the last couple of months.

Writing is simply one of those superpowers, and the greatest part about it being a superpower is that it is a skill, meaning you can not only learn it, but improve on it daily.

What are the upsides of writing?

Clarity of Thought
If you’ve ever felt yourself get confused trying to explain something to someone, it might simply be because you haven’t created the apt enough roadmap for it.
Writing is a lot like storytelling, and the best writing is usually the best form of storytelling.
What writing makes you do is hone your ability to design a beginning, middle and end. Having a cohesive story means that you close your loop.
Better Communication Skills
Writing better automatically prompts you to communicate better.
While in your brain you might substitute broken fragments of your thoughts with filler words, this isn’t possible at all when writing.
Each word you use has value, and serves a purpose.
Learning to write valuably, also compels you to speak the same way.
Value Addition
Writing is a skill very few workplaces help you hone, but honing one independently will open the door to so many more workplaces for you.
All companies - big, small, and everything in-between require a good writer to be on their team.
Whether you’re a marketer, someone that writes newsletters, proofreads content & copy going out, writes mails to stakeholders & partners. The use cases are endless.

So, how do I start?

Well, this one’s easy, you kind of just have to

Writing’s an intimidating skill, but let us assure you that people who are good writers did not simply wake up one day and start writing well.

It takes years & years of honing it as a skill & getting better.

Remember the age-old wisdom of “Practice makes perfect”? Yeah, it’s never stood truer for a habit.

Here are some tips you can take to start your journey. It’s harder to start alone, and hence the first tip.

Find an Accountabuddy
We have a 700+ fellow community, find someone who you vibe with, and ask them if they’re into wanting to cultivate a writing habit.
The purpose of this is that you check-in on them, and they on you & both of you make sure you stay on track.
Pick an achievable goal
It’s easy to say, “I want to run a 10k marathon at EOY” but writing isn’t quite the same. Especially if you’re new to it, if you give yourself too large a goal, you will end up never wanting to reach it.
Even if you pick a goal of 10 pieces of 100 words each over 2 months, those are all deadlines that work.
It shouldn’t be work, it should be fun.
Learn from those before you
The best way to learn to write better is to try and condense an idea, thought or topic into a format you would like to consume & read.
Copy what you’re reading, but try and make it your own. Remember how we tried to do this for homework in school? Yep, same vibes. But don’t plagiarise.
How do I find ideas?
There are 10,000 thoughts that whir through a human’s brain in a day. All it takes is for you to find one that intrigues you enough to want to read/consume content about.
We trust that as Stoans you have the curiosity we expect the best minds to have. Nurture this curiosity to teach what you’ve learnt.
Ideaboard
Learn a way to capture your ideas, reach out to people and talk to them, see what gets you interested & want to ask more questions, try and turn it into a piece of content, whatever it might be.

There are more than enough avenues within Stoa for you to find people:

To read your content : Boost-Posts/ Help-Me-Out/Writing
To give you feedback: Writing channel

Start First, Stress Later -

📆 Upcoming Events 📆

This Tuesday, 31st May, at 8PM
We will be hosting Ankita & Nikhil from Naturehealers who will be talking to us about building sustainability into your businesses, and how businesses can move to a more sustainable front.
This Thursday, 2nd June, at 8PM
We’ll be hosting one of our Community Mixers. If you’ve been having a lot of Analysis Paralysis about getting to know other members of the Community, this’ll be a great way to break into building your relationships from Stoa.

We’re also hosting two other upcoming events we’d like you to know about.

Next Thursday, 9th June, at 8PM
Bharat Babbar will be walking you through some of the best tips, tricks & hacks about communicating in the best way possible.

Note: Registrations will be capped for this event, so make sure you register in advance.

2 weeks ahead, 15th June, Wednesday at 8PM
The founders of Fampay will be joining us to talk about their journey building the community & company they have targetting a largely untapped audience of the Indian demographic.
Note: This event is on a Wednesday, different from our regular Tue/Thu schedules.