These days I find myself completely obsessed with writing. Once I start, inspiration comes in waves — writing leads to more ideas, more ideas demand more writing, and the loop sustains itself beautifully.
Here are a few thoughts I want to put down.
The Magical Rubber Duck
In the developer community, there’s a well-known trick: place a rubber duck on your desk, and when you’re stuck on a problem, explain it to the duck out loud. More often than not, the solution appears halfway through the explanation.
Of course, it isn’t the duck that’s magical. It’s the act of articulation — the moment you must explain something to the outside world, you’re forced to confront what you actually understand and what you’ve been glossing over. Writing does the same thing, only more deliberately.
Chrono-centric Writing
In my last two blog posts, I wrote in a chronocentric way — tracing events in the order they happened. This forced me to reconstruct the past clearly, and in doing so, I began to see the chain of cause and consequence that brought me to where I am now. All things leave traces, and I felt a quiet satisfaction in recognizing them.
This style of writing offers two things in particular.
Clear thoughts and fresh inspiration. The process of listing and sorting what happened gives you a cleaner view of the whole picture — and that clarity often reveals both the problem and its solution.
A form of external monitoring, if you choose it. This one is more complex. Since I publish my writing on a personal website open to the public, it takes on a different dimension.
I believe everyone carries certain experiences from childhood — things that shape their behaviors, thoughts, and values in ways they may not immediately recognize. These patterns, if you look carefully, reveal themselves in writing style.
My usual process: write a draft first, then feed it into an AI to polish. In that exchange, I’m also implicitly asking the AI to observe the kind of thoughts I’m having — to notice patterns, assumptions, maybe even blind spots or residual weight from old experiences. After publishing, I sometimes ask an AI to analyze my writing as a whole and reflect back anything it notices about my psychology or personality. It sounds unusual, but it’s genuinely useful. Even though every post is published exactly as I intend it, the intention itself is a window into something deeper.
In chronocentric writing especially, I also track how I feel at different stages — as president of BP Debate Union, as a student, as a person navigating different seasons of life. Seeing those emotions laid out helps me ask: why did I feel this way? Was it justified? Is there something here worth examining?
Clearing the Mind
Writing empties the mind in the most satisfying way. Creative people need an output — a place for ideas to land so they stop circling.
I tend toward perfectionism, which means I carry a heavy mental load of things I want to do but haven’t yet done. Unwritten blog posts, unexplored ideas, half-formed inspirations from tournaments or conversations — they sit in my head and press. But the moment I write them down, they’re released. They have a home. My mind is lighter, and whenever I need them, they’re waiting for me on my website — useful to future-me, and perhaps to others too.
Inspiration and Creativity
Writing is also a time machine. Whatever I put down becomes something the future me can return to — a log of what I was thinking, building toward, or dreaming about. And the act of writing itself generates more to write about, because thinking breeds thinking. When I sit down to write about writing, I find myself thinking about creativity, about purpose, about tools, about community — and suddenly there’s a whole map of ideas where there was just a blank page.
And here’s a small example of how the loop works: I was writing about creativity and inspiration, and the thought of Saint-Exupéry arrived on its own. One idea reaching for another. That’s the thing about writing — it connects what you already know in ways you didn’t expect.
I believe this holds regardless of your field. For me it’s debate and programming — writing helps me see what I want to build and gives me the clarity to begin. But if you play music, writing might help you find your style. If you’re a teacher, it might surface a better way to present what you know. If you’re a student, it could become your best tool for organizing knowledge. The benefit is real; only the shape of it changes.
Finding Identity
I love The Little Prince, and I love Saint-Exupéry. In one of his reflections, he writes something to the effect of: “To know my position, I need their existence.” He meant his friends — that it is in relation to others that we find out who we are.
Writing works similarly, but more directly. A friend reflects you back through their eyes, their reactions, the contrast between your personalities. Writing reflects you back through your own words — undiluted, immediate. You see yourself on the page without the mediating lens of another person.
Conclusion
Writing brings different things to different people. Styles differ, subjects differ, purposes differ. But I believe that once you begin — whether through writing, painting, music, or any act of making — you start to find your own reflection in it. And that reflection tells you something about who you are.
So if you’ve been thinking about starting: try it. The first few posts may feel awkward, even embarrassing. But somewhere around the third or fourth, something shifts. You begin to recognize yourself in what you’ve made — and that’s where it gets interesting.
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