I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.
Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” 1976
Each day I’d open my notebook and copy yesterday’s principles to a new page by hand. Some lines I wrote without thinking. Others slowed me down.
Then I moved my principles to a digital list. I barely opened it. The friction and engagement were gone.
The daily rewrite was doing more work than I knew. The repetition kept those principles in front of me. It was also meaningful friction that surfaced what was still worth rewriting.
Call it natural selection on your ideas. Rewriting acts as selection pressure. Strong ideas stay. The rest fall away.
This is how I built my rules. The same logic shapes my experiments list.
A digital list lets old ideas that are no longer relevant sit around. The rewrite shows you which are still worth holding onto.
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What do you believe enough that it’s worth rewriting daily?
