Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now为何您现在就应该开博客

Reddit discussion with >100 comments here.这里有一个超过 100 条评论的 Reddit 讨论。

Summary: in this post I explain why you should start a blog (to help others and to help yourself), what to write about, and how to start it. I hope to persuade you that you should start a blog even if you feel that you have nothing to say and even if almost nobody will read it.总结：在这篇文章中，我将解释为何你应该开博客（帮助他人也帮助自己），写些什么内容，以及如何开始。我希望说服你，即便你觉得自己没什么可说的，即便几乎没人会读，你也应该开一个博客。

What to write about 写些什么

I looked over all of my writing and determined that it all originated from one of the following:我回顾了自己所有的写作，确定它们都源自以下几种情况之一：

• I repeatedly gave the same advice to my friends我反复给我的朋友们同样的建议。
  • Why You Should Join Twitter Right Now为何您现在就该加入推特
  • Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible我曾有过的每一个关于提高效率的想法，尽可能简洁地表述。
  • Instilling Novel Thought Patterns and Making Your Long-Term Memory Accountable with Anki利用 Anki 培养新颖的思维模式并让您的长期记忆负责起来
  • What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice《你的人生该如何度过？方向与建议》
  • this very post 这篇文章
• I wanted to share my personal experiences and thought other people will find it useful我想分享一下我的个人经历，觉得其他人可能会觉得有用。
  • On Friendship and on Finding Your People论友谊以及找到你的同类
  • 17-20: a Retrospective on Four Years in College17 至 20 岁：大学四年回顾
  • Tools / Gear 工具/齿轮
• I disagreed with people, left comments online, and had some ideas about stuff that I read我不同意某些人的观点，在网上发表评论，还对读到的东西有一些想法。
  • Contra Scott Alexander’s “The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life”反驳斯科特·亚历山大的《“尾部渐行渐远”作为人生的隐喻》
  • Against Basic Income 反对基本收入
• I shared thoughts and ideas with friends via conversations, IM, and email and realized they might be interesting to other people我通过交谈、即时通讯和电子邮件与朋友们分享想法和观点，意识到它们或许也会让其他人感兴趣。
  • Research Ideas 研究的想法
  • Links 链接
• I investigated things 我调查了事情。
  • Is anything inherently difficult?有什么事情是本身就很困难的吗？
  • Where does talent come from? How easy is it to discover talent?人才从何而来？发现人才有多容易？
  • Tweet rot 推特腐烂
• I privately collected stuff I find fascinating and figured other people may also find it interesting我私下里收集了一些我觉得很有趣的东西，并且觉得其他人可能也会觉得有意思。
  • People and Things I Would Fund If I Were a Billionaire如果我是亿万富翁，我会资助的人和事
  • Tweet-Sized Insight Porn 推文篇幅的深度见解（或：推文篇幅的深度分析）
• I wanted to create art我想创作艺术作品。
  • Why You Should Not Go on a Tinder Date with Me为何你不该和我在 Tinder 上约会
  • RAPIDLY PRESS X TO REFUSE TO COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR OWN MORTALITY快速按 X 键拒绝接受自己的终有一死
  • Philosophers for Sale 待售的哲学家

Most likely you do at least some of the things I described above. And that means you probably have something to write about.很可能你至少做过我上面描述的一些事情。这意味着你大概有东西可写了。

“But nobody will read my blog”“但没人会读我的博客。”

It doesn’t matter! Your blog may have the median of 0 visitors per day (as my blog had for the first two years). Your blog may be ungoogleable. Your blog may have no subscribers. But if you’re not embarrassed to tell people “oh, btw I wrote about this / collected some things on the topic on my blog”, the purpose of the blog is fulfilled, since this is the best indicator of your writing actually being helpful.没关系！你的博客可能每天只有 0 个访客（就像我的博客在头两年那样）。你的博客可能在谷歌上搜不到。你的博客可能没有订阅者。但如果你不觉得难为情地告诉别人“哦，顺便说一下，我在博客上写了关于这个的内容/收集了一些相关的东西”，那么博客的目的就达到了，因为这是你的写作确实有帮助的最佳指标。

But there are a few other reasons to write, the most important of which is that…但还有其他一些写作的理由，其中最重要的一个原因是……

Writing helps you think better写作能让你更好地思考。

In a parallel universe I became a psychiatrist. In this universe I sometimes offer my friends to listen to their problems like a therapist would have and to maybe give them a few comments. In the last couple of months I did this to two friends and both of them told me almost the same exact thing: while preparing for the conversation with me, they ended up writing a lot of their thoughts and concerns down in a readable, essay-like form for the first time and this very act helped them to understand what is going on much better and to fix a lot of problems even prior our conversation.在另一个平行宇宙中，我成了一名精神科医生。在这个宇宙里，有时我会像治疗师那样倾听朋友的问题，并给他们一些意见。在过去的几个月里，我为两个朋友这样做了，他们几乎都跟我说了同样的话：在为跟我谈话做准备时，他们第一次把很多想法和担忧写成了条理清晰、类似文章的形式，而这一行为帮助他们更好地理解了事情的来龙去脉，甚至在我们谈话之前就解决了不少问题。

This fact is very frequently lost when discussing writing: writing not only helps you to understand what’s going on and to crystallize your thoughts, it actually makes you think of new ideas and come up with solutions to your problems.在讨论写作时，人们常常忽略这样一个事实：写作不仅能帮助你理解正在发生的事情，还能让你的想法变得清晰，实际上它还能让你想到新的点子，并找到解决问题的办法。

But this only applies to “essay-like” writing where you pretend to write for someone else and think about narrative and exposition and not just write down a few keyword-bullets for yourself. This is actually why you should not only write blog posts but also have a private journal with coherent text about what’s going on in your life and in your head. I write in my journal anywhere from a few times a week to once every few months.但这只适用于那种“类似散文”的写作，即你假装为他人而写，思考叙述和阐述，而不仅仅是为自己写下几个关键词。这也是为什么你不仅要写博客文章，还要有一个私人日记，用连贯的文字记录生活中和脑海里发生的事情。我写日记的频率从一周几次到几个月一次不等。

The analogy is as follows: you probably had experience learning some math or physics or whatever else where you listen to the lecturer and you understand everything perfectly and then you try to actually solve the problem and you realize that you have no idea how to do it. This is the way thinking and everything else in the world works. You can read all the self-help books in the world. You can read all the blog posts in the world. It’s not enough. Good thinking doesn’t happen by passive osmosis of other people’s good thinking. You have to actually write essays and journals to debug yourself and your ideas. And then, crucially, act (a) on this thinking.这个类比是这样的：你可能有过这样的经历，比如学习数学、物理或者其他什么学科，你听老师讲得明明白白，觉得自己完全理解了，可是一到自己动手解决问题的时候，才发现根本不知道从何下手。这就是思考以及世界上其他事情的运作方式。你可以读遍所有的自助书籍，可以浏览所有的博客文章，但这还不够。好的思考不是靠被动地吸收别人好的思考而产生的。你得亲自写文章和日记来剖析自己和自己的想法。然后，至关重要的是，要根据这种思考采取行动。

(btw, this is exactly why Bezos forces everybody to write memos in form of essays (a))（顺便说一句，这正是贝索斯要求所有人以论文形式写备忘录的原因（a）

“But I don’t have anything original to say and I would be just repeating things said elsewhere on the internet!”“但我没什么新东西可说，我讲的不过是网上别处已经说过的那些话！”

Consider a university professor teaching a course. Does she say anything original? Do you think she should cancel her course because somebody else discovered the things she wants to teach? Or does she have to cancel her course simply because there is a similar course at some other university?设想一位大学教授在授课。她讲的内容有新意吗？你认为她应该因为别人已经发现了她想讲授的东西而取消课程吗？还是说仅仅因为其他大学也有类似的课程，她就得取消自己的课程？

Or consider yourself. Do you avoid having conversations with your friends when you think you have nothing original to say? Do you share things with them? Do you give advice? Do you help to understand things?或者想想你自己。当你觉得自己没什么新东西可说时，你会避免和朋友交谈吗？你会和他们分享东西吗？你会给他们提建议吗？你会帮助他们理解事情吗？

As a concrete example, consider my most popular post ever: What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice. Let’s go through it section by section:举个具体的例子，来看看我最受欢迎的一篇文章：《你的人生该何去何从？方向与建议》。让我们逐节来看：

1. a bunch of links I collected我收集的一堆链接
2. semi-trivial advice that basically says that you should start working on something and then share it with other people这种半吊子的建议基本上就是说你应该着手做点什么，然后与其他人分享。
3. a few notes on cold emails, which are basically a rephrase of stuff I read on twitter + two examples of my cold emails which are just rephrasing all the other good cold emails I saw before关于冷邮件的一些笔记，基本上是我在推特上看到的内容的改写。 两个我发的冷邮件的例子，只是对之前看到的其他不错的冷邮件的改写。
4. a bunch more links I collected我收集的更多链接
5. a bunch more links with quotes更多带有引语的链接

Does this post contain a single original idea? I don’t think it does. Is it useful? Well, yeah, it is. But this brings me to a more general idea…这篇帖子包含哪怕一个原创的想法吗？我觉得没有。那它有用吗？嗯，还是有用的。但这让我想到了一个更普遍的观点……

Why unoriginal writing is useful为何模仿写作有用

Because it helps in the process of discovery and in the process of supporting underappreciated ideas.因为它有助于发现的过程，也有助于支持那些未受重视的想法。

• Mendel’s ideas were basically ignored for thirty-four years after his publication. The guy who decided to publish his unoriginal thoughts on Mendel’s work in 1901 was necessary for the appreciation and the spread of Mendel’s ideas.孟德尔的学说在他发表后的 34 年里基本上无人问津。1901 年决定发表对孟德尔研究成果的非原创性见解的那个人，对于孟德尔学说的被认可和传播起到了关键作用。
• it might be the case that the person reading my notes about cold emails previously saw n mentions of the thought “sending cold emails is important” and my post might be the final (n+1)st encounter of this idea that finally convinces them that it’s important and finally makes them send an important cold email有可能正在阅读我关于冷邮件笔记的人之前已经看到了 n 次“发送冷邮件很重要”这一想法，而我的帖子可能是他们最后一次接触到这个观点，最终说服他们这很重要，并促使他们发送一封重要的冷邮件。
• this is also largely the value of e.g. Tim Ferriss’s podcast. There’s not that many new ideas in every episode but if you listen one episode a week, there’s a good chance some of the most important lessons will finally get stuck in your head and will motivate you, even if not strictly teaching you anything new这也是比如蒂姆·费里斯（Tim Ferriss）播客的很大价值所在。每一期节目里并没有太多全新的想法，但如果你每周听一期，那么其中一些最重要的经验教训很有可能最终会印在你的脑海里，并激励着你，即便严格来说并没有教你什么新东西。

If you’re still unsure about the value of (un)originality, watch this Tessa Violet video where she explains all of this perfectly. My rephrasing of some of the points she makes:如果您对于（不）原创的价值仍不确定，不妨观看一下 Tessa Violet 的这段视频，她在其中对此进行了完美的阐释。我对其部分观点的重新表述如下：

• almost all songs and almost all writing is very similar to each other. All songs are very similar and the artists especially are very aware of their influences几乎所有的歌曲和几乎所有的写作都非常相似。所有的歌曲都很相似，而且艺术家们尤其清楚彼此之间的相互影响。
• you’re not a well the produces art by itself. Most art is a riff off from something we experienced, saw, heard or read, thus necessarily not very original你并非一台能自行创作艺术的机器。大多数艺术作品都是基于我们所经历、所见、所闻或所读的事物进行的再创作，因此必然不是非常原创。
• when Tessa was just starting out, one exercise she did was she picked a song she loved, looked up the chords, and asked herself “what would this song sound like if I had written it?” 当泰莎刚开始起步时，她做过的一个练习是选一首自己喜欢的歌，查出和弦，然后问自己：“如果这首歌是我写的，会是什么样的？”
  • this can be applied to writing! Take some blog post that you love and try to figure out what would you change in it / how would you write it这可以运用到写作中！找一篇你喜欢的博客文章，试着想想你会对它做出哪些改动/你会如何来写。

You should still watch the video in full - I covered like 20% of it in these bullets.您还是应该完整地观看视频——我在这几条要点里大概只讲了其中的 20%。

(Tessa generally has the best. life. lessons)（泰莎通常有着最棒的人生经验。）

A note on your ideas feeling less original than they actually are关于你的想法感觉不如实际那么新颖的一点说明

Gleb Posobin (a): 波索宾(a)：

Your own ideas mostly seem trivial to you because you have the right concept structures in place to support them. You wouldn’t come up with these ideas otherwise. So it’s easier to notice your own ideas in a dialogue: your friend has different concept structures and notices them.你自己的想法大多在你看来微不足道，因为你有恰当的概念结构来支撑它们。否则你根本不会想到这些。所以在对话中更容易注意到自己的想法：你的朋友有着不同的概念结构，所以能注意到它们。

Corollary: don’t be afraid to say obvious things.推论：不要害怕说出显而易见的事情。

Corollary 2: it is ok if it seems to you that you do not have nontrivial ideas of your own. It is just hard to notice them.推论 2：如果你觉得自己没有独到的想法，这没关系。只是这些想法很难被察觉。

A note on academics and value of unoriginality关于学术与非原创性的价值的一则笔记

Academics gain prestige by publishing novel stuff. This gives them a warped perspective on what is valuable. You can’t publish a paper that would summarize five other papers and argue that these papers are undervalued in a top journal but in the real world the value of doing that might be very high. The mechanisms of discovery are broken in academia.学者们通过发表新颖的东西来获得声望。这使他们对什么是有价值的东西产生了扭曲的看法。你不能在顶级期刊上发表一篇总结了其他五篇论文并指出这些论文被低估了的论文，但在现实世界中，做这件事的价值可能非常高。学术界的发现机制已经失灵了。

How to start a blog如何开始写博客

1. go over your emails and IM and see if some of the conversations there fit the themes I wrote about in the first section of the post查看一下你的电子邮件和即时通讯信息，看看其中是否有符合我在帖子第一部分所写主题的对话。
2. try noticing the things I wrote about in the first section (e.g. do you tend to say the same things to your friends) for a while and write down some notes in a text file. Tab Snooze this post one week into the future to make sure you’re doing this.试着留意一下我在第一部分提到的那些事（比如你是否总是对朋友说同样的话），留意一段时间，并在文本文件中记下一些笔记。将此帖延后一周再提醒自己，以确保你正在这么做。
3. clear out an entire day to write (yes, this is possible however busy you feel you are. Let it be some next Saturday or Sunday)抽出一整天的时间来写作（没错，这是可行的，无论你觉得自己有多忙。可以定在下周六或周日）
4. write during that special day在那个特别的日子写下来

• here’s how to actually follow though on this以下是如何真正落实这一点的方法。

1. launch a blog on wordpress / github’s jekyll / whatever. It doesn’t matter in the beginning and you can always change the stack later. At first just make sure to actually publish something. I started out with github pages and then moved to Hugo on Netlify.在 WordPress、GitHub 的 Jekyll 或者其他平台上开通一个博客。一开始无所谓用哪个，之后你随时可以更换平台。首先确保发布一些内容。我一开始用的是 GitHub Pages，后来改用了 Netlify 上的 Hugo。

“Writing is really hard” 写作真的很难。

Yes. It will get slightly easier, though (I’ve been writing quite a lot for the last few years and big posts still require insane amounts of effort). Here are a few tricks to make it easier:是。不过，这会稍微容易一些（过去几年我写了不少东西，但长篇大论仍需要耗费巨大的精力）。这里有几个小窍门能让写作变得轻松些：

• pretend that you have a conversation with a friend and dictate to your phone or write into a chat with yourself (a) and then edit the resulting text
  • or do actually have a conversation with a friend explaining your idea, while recording it. Then transcribe and edit it into a post或者你也可以和朋友进行一次谈话，向他们解释你的想法，同时进行录音。然后将谈话内容转录并编辑成一篇帖子。
  • a friend comments after actually trying this: “i’m shocked. just sat down and wrote a big text, based on a recording. will edit it and post it later”一位朋友在实际尝试后评论道：“我震惊了。刚根据一段录音坐下来写了一大段文字，稍后会编辑好发布。”
  假装和朋友聊天，对着手机口述或者在聊天框里自己跟自己对话（a），然后对生成的文字进行编辑。
• or pretend you’re writing an email to your friend (by opening email and literally writing the letter). Then edit this email into a post - “my friend is a grad student who has taught several freshman writing seminars and says that by far the single greatest improvement in writing is when he tells them to write to a specific person they know” (a)
  • like literally, if you were talking to a friend and realized that this is something that could be interesting to other people, write an email to your friend and then edit it into a blog post就像真的那样，如果你在和朋友聊天时意识到这可能是其他人感兴趣的事情，就给朋友写封邮件，然后把它修改成一篇博客文章。
  我的朋友是一名研究生，他教过好几届大一写作课，他说迄今为止，写作水平提升最大的方法就是让学生们给某个他们认识的具体的人写信。（a）
• try The Most Dangerous Writing App (both this and the “dictate to yourself” thing are from Devon Zuegel’s advice on writing (a))
  • DO ACTUALLY TRY THIS DON’T FLINCH AWAY. This app might seem like the dumbest thing in the world but it DOES REALLY HELP. And if it doesn’t work, you will just lose 5 minutes. 真的试试看，别退缩。这个应用程序可能看起来是世界上最愚蠢的东西，但它真的很有帮助。而且如果没用，你也就浪费五分钟而已。
    • a friend of mine whom I recommended to try this app a few days ago first said there’s no way this works, I pressed him to try it regardless, and it worked 几天前我向一位朋友推荐了这个应用程序，他一开始说这根本不可能行得通，但我还是劝他试试看，结果还真管用。
      • same for all the other advice in this post basically基本上，这篇帖子中的所有其他建议也是如此。
  试试“最危险的写作应用程序”（这两项建议——包括“对着自己口述”——均来自德文·祖格尔关于写作的建议（a）
• if you’re writing a post and you don’t like it, don’t be scared to just start writing it from the beginning again. I rewrite most of my posts from the ground up several times. Like literally - I write an intro and then if I don’t like it, I just try to figure out how to make it good and then rewrite it completely. The first draft is just there to keep the juices flowing.如果你正在写一篇文章，但觉得不满意，别害怕就从头再来。我的大多数文章都会从头到尾重写好几次。真的，我会先写个开头，如果觉得不好，就琢磨怎么把它写好，然后彻底重写。初稿只是为了让思路顺畅。
• See my So, you want to write something…所以你想写点什么……

Why should The Most Dangerous Writing App work? Because it forces you to write at least something (a):为什么“最危险写作应用”会奏效？因为它迫使你至少写点什么（a）：

Probably the #1 struggle I hear students mention when they talk about writing is the “staring at a blank page” phenomenon. Just try and get something on paper. Even if it’s total stream of consciousness word vomit, that’s still something you can edit and re-organize into an actual paper.或许学生们在谈论写作时提到的首要难题就是“面对空白纸张”的现象。试着在纸上写点什么吧。哪怕只是完全杂乱无章的意识流式倾诉，那也是可以修改和重新组织成一篇真正文章的东西。

Secondly, it helps to realize that there is zero obligation or expectation to be perfect on the first try. My advisor always said the explicit point of a first draft is to get you to a second draft. I think I was on like, draft #15 or 16 by the time I actually finished my bachelor’s thesis. [emphasis mine; also I rewrote this post 2 times and rewrite most of the posts at least 1-2 times before publishing]其次，要明白第一次尝试做到完美是没有任何义务和期望的。我的导师总是说，初稿的明确目的就是让你能写出第二稿。我觉得我写学士论文的时候，初稿都写了大概十五六遍了，才最终完成。[重点为我所加；另外这篇帖子我重写了两次，而且大多数帖子在发布前至少重写了一到两次]

A few more reasons to write多写几条写作的理由

• even though most blogs will remain deeply unpopular, some people will achieve and maybe go beyond the level of originality and insight of Scott Alexander and will change other peoples’ lives just as he did. I want as many people with such potential as possible to start writing and to not be disaffected after initial apparent lack of success (it took Scott Alexander from 2005 to 2013 before his writing became truly popular). Since in advance you don’t know what level of success you’ll achieve, it’s worth trying even if right now you’re doubtful about that ever happening 尽管大多数博客仍会无人问津，但有些人会达到甚至超越斯科特·亚历山大的原创性和洞察力水平，并像他一样改变他人的生活。我希望尽可能多有这种潜力的人开始写作，并且在起初看似不成功时不要灰心丧气（斯科特·亚历山大从 2005 年到 2013 年，他的作品才真正走红）。由于事先你不知道自己能取得何种程度的成功，即便现在对此心存疑虑，也值得一试。
  • also, whatever profession you choose, if your name becomes known within its practitioners, that will help enormously with your career而且，无论你选择何种职业，如果在该行业的从业者中你的名字为人所知，这对你的职业生涯会有极大的帮助。
• having a blog may be useful as a way to demonstrate that you think well when you e.g. send cold emails拥有博客可能很有用，比如当你发送冷邮件时，它能证明你思维清晰。

One more question to ask yourself about your writing关于你的写作，还有一个问题要问自己

Would you save the post that you wrote to your OneNote/Evernote/whatevernote if you randomly stumbled on it on the internet? If you want your writing to stay with people, you need to first make sure that it would have stayed with you!如果你在网上偶然看到自己写的东西，你会把它保存到 OneNote、Evernote 或者其他笔记软件里吗？如果你想让你的文字留在别人心里，首先得确保它能留在你自己的心里！

Thanks to Yevhenii Terentiev and Masha Taktasheva for forcing me to finally write this post.感谢叶夫根尼·特伦季耶夫和玛莎·塔克塔舍娃，是他们促使我终于写下了这篇帖子。

Appendix: Why did Peter Thiel write Zero to One?附录：彼得·蒂尔为何要写《从 0 到 1》？

To convince a couple of people that they do indeed have a secret that is worth something and to actually do something with it, despite the consensus being that all the low-hanging fruit is already plucked and that working for the giant corporations is the way to go.要说服几个人相信他们确实掌握着有价值的秘密，并且要真正利用它，尽管普遍认为所有唾手可得的机会都已被摘取，而且为大公司工作才是正途。

Further reading 进一步的阅读

“you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.” (a) by Patrick McKenzie“你严重低估了 a）你所知道的而其他人不知道的东西有多少，以及 b）将这些发表对你带来的实际好处。”（a）帕特里克·麦肯齐

“Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.” (a) by Patrick McKenzie (this one is especially funny because when I came up with this idea of “but professors still teach completely unoriginal things” from a few sections ago I was 100% sure I invented it independently but no it was just me rephrasing Patrick)有些人确实能从那些众所周知的建议中获益，原因就跟尽管学校里教的每门课都曾有人教过，但我们还是坚持开办学校一样。（a）帕特里克·麦肯齐（这段特别有趣，因为当我之前想到“但教授们讲授的还是那些毫无新意的东西”这个观点时，我百分之百确信自己是独立想出来的，但其实只是我在重新表述帕特里克的观点）

Devon Zuegel: Cities as a Superpower (a) by David Perell and Devon Zuegel:大卫·佩雷尔和德文·祖格尔：《城市作为超级力量（一）》

I think it actually goes even much further than memory. With writing, it is fundamentally the process of externalizing an idea which allows you to play with it in ways that I don’t think are so easy when it’s in your head. I’m certainly not capable of it. Writing things down can reduce the amount of ego that you have as you fiddled with an idea. Maybe I’m just crazy, but when I wrote them down and almost pretend like the person who wrote that wasn’t me, it was like, that’s past Devon or someone else entirely. I can detach myself from it much more in a way where, when I am a thinking through something just in my head and lying in bed wondering. I’m not going to be as rigorous about it. Now that’s not strictly worse. There are other things like everyone has great thoughts in the shower for instance. It’s very common. But it doesn’t serve all purposes, especially if you’re trying to vet and find the nooks and crannies of an idea. When you write it down, when an idea has inconsistencies or gaping holes, they are clear and right in the face when it’s written down in a way that is just so easy to gloss over when they’re in your head.我认为这实际上远不止是记忆的问题。写作从根本上来说是将一个想法外化的过程，这让你能够以我认为在脑海中难以做到的方式对其进行琢磨。我肯定做不到。把想法写下来能减少你在琢磨它时的自我意识。也许我只是疯了，但当我把它们写下来，几乎假装写下这些的人不是我，而是过去的德文或者完全是另一个人时，就好像，那是过去的德文或者完全是另一个人。这样我能更轻易地与之拉开距离，而当我只是躺在床上在脑海中思考时，我不会那么严谨。这当然不是绝对的不好。比如，每个人在淋浴时都会有很棒的想法，这很常见。但它并非适用于所有情况，尤其是当你试图审视并找出一个想法的细微之处时。当你把它写下来时，想法中的不一致之处或明显的漏洞会清晰地呈现在眼前，而这些在脑海中时却很容易被忽略。

The Greatest Exercise in Procrastination by Masha Taktasheva:玛莎·塔克塔舍娃的《拖延之最》

I thought writing something that you already have in your head is very easy. No, it’s not easy at all. Though you seem to have a structure in your head, you can often see gaps in your argumentation and inconsistency of thoughts once you tell them to another person or write it down on paper. You can believe that you perfectly understand everything in your thoughts and it’s all properly aligned, but this is quite hard to achieve. …我原以为把脑海里已有的东西写下来很容易。不，这根本不容易。尽管你似乎在脑海里已经构建好了框架，但一旦你把想法告诉别人或者写在纸上，往往就会发现论证中的漏洞和思路的不连贯。你可能会认为自己对脑海里的所有东西都理解得很透彻，而且一切都安排得井井有条，但这其实很难做到。…

I wanted to say everything. And said nothing. I perceived the text about “something” as a comprehensive list of all thoughts that I had, have and will have about “something”. It sounds silly, but I was stuck with this when I had actually started to put my thoughts in order. But you don’t have to be afraid. In regular conversations, we express a lot of thoughts, which are often incomplete and untidy, but this doesn’t make them any less important. After all, the text is just my thoughts converted into words with some delay.我本想倾诉一切，却什么也没说。我把关于“某事”的那段文字视为我过去、现在和将来对“某事”所有想法的汇总。这听起来很傻，但当我真正开始整理思绪时，却卡在了这里。不过你不必害怕。在日常交谈中，我们表达了很多想法，它们常常不完整也不连贯，但这并不意味着它们就不重要。毕竟，文字不过是我的想法经过一定时间延迟后转化成的语言。

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (a) by John Salvatier:约翰·萨尔瓦蒂尔（John Salvatier）所著《现实有着惊人的细节》

At every step and every level there’s an abundance of detail with material consequences.在每一步和每一个层面，都充满了具有实际影响的细节。

It’s tempting to think ‘So what?’ and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; that’s what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.人们很容易觉得“那又怎样？”然后将这些细节视为无关紧要或仅限于楼梯木工的特殊之处。它们确实是楼梯木工的特殊之处，这就是它们成为细节的原因。但大量有意义的细节的存在并非楼梯所独有。令人惊讶的细节是近距离接触现实时几乎普遍存在的特性。

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.如果你留心观察，这种现象随处可见。比如，你可能有过初次尝试某事的经历，也许是第一次种菜，或者第一次使用 Haskell 包，结果被各种恼人的小问题搞得焦头烂额。但后来你多加练习，然后对自己说：“天哪，其实一直都这么简单，真不知道当时为什么那么费劲。”我们碰到了宇宙的一个基本特性，却误以为是自己的能力不足。

Sahil Lavingia (a):

More importantly, learn to rewrite.更重要的是，要学会改写。

The best stuff is rewritten over and over again. I know everything I’ve published that has done well has gone through several drafts and incorporates feedback from dozens of other people.最出色的作品都是经过反复修改而成的。我知道我发表过的所有受欢迎的作品都经过了多次修改，并且融入了数十人的反馈意见。

“But I’m not a great writer.”“但我不是个出色的作家。”

Neither am I. But I am great at taking my first “vomit” draft and spending weeks to make it better and better, over and over again.我也不擅长。但我很擅长把我的初稿当作“呕吐物”一样，然后花上好几周的时间反复修改，让它变得越来越好。

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online by David Perell:大卫·佩雷尔所著《终极线上写作指南》：

Popular blogs don’t exist by themselves. Your blog is like an island, and you need to join an archipelago. Finding a community like Ribbonfarm or Less Wrong is one of the fastest ways to spin up an audience. And if you can’t find a community, write for a specific person with a big audience. Whether you write for a community or an individual, if you can attract the gaze of big accounts who promote your work, your audience will grow.热门博客并非孤立存在。你的博客就像一座孤岛，你需要加入群岛之中。找到像 Ribbonfarm 或 Less Wrong 这样的社区是迅速积累受众的最快途径之一。如果找不到合适的社区，那就为拥有大量受众的特定个人写作。无论是为社区还是个人写作，只要你能吸引那些大号的关注并推广你的作品，你的受众就会增长。

You’re Good Enough, You’re Smart Enough, and People Would Like You (a) by Zvi Mowshowitz:《你足够好，你足够聪明，人们也会喜欢你》（a）作者：兹维·莫肖维茨

The problem is that our calibration is bad. The Fear has gone too far, and is keeping too many people quiet too often. Calibration is hard, and calibration of your own skill level is very hard. It speaks well of us that we would rather think of ourselves a level below where we are, than think of ourselves as a level above, but getting it right would be better still. We also are too afraid of trying to go one level too high, and not afraid enough of false humility. I am going to suggest that everyone adjust accordingly.问题在于我们的自我评估出了偏差。恐惧情绪已经过度泛滥，常常让太多人保持沉默。自我评估很难，对自己的能力水平进行准确评估更是难上加难。我们宁愿低估自己，也不愿高估自己，这说明我们很有自知之明，但更准确地评估自己会更好。我们还太害怕挑战自己，不敢尝试更高一级的难度，却对故作谦逊警惕不足。我建议大家做出相应调整。

Consider levels on the following (0-5) online scale: Absent-Lurker-Commenter-Poster/Blogger-Organizer-Leader. You could have a similar offline scale: Absent-Silent-Talker-Presenter-Organizer-Leader.请考虑以下（0 至 5 分）在线参与度等级：缺席者 - 潜水者 - 评论者 - 发帖者/博主 - 组织者 - 领导者。您也可以有一个类似的线下等级：缺席者 - 沉默者 - 谈话者 - 演讲者 - 组织者 - 领导者。

My rule of thumb would be: Assume that you are ready to be one level higher than you think you are ready for.我的经验之谈是：假定你已经做好了比自己认为的更高一级的准备。

Twelve Rules For Life (a) (quoted by Scott Alexander in his review of the book):《人生十二法则》（a）（斯科特·亚历山大在其对该书的评论中引用）：

The people I listen to need to talk, because that’s how people think. People need to think…True thinking is complex and demanding. It requires you to be articulate speaker and careful, judicious listener at the same time. It involves conflict. So you have to tolerate conflict. Conflict involves negotiation and compromise. So, you have to learn to give and take and to modify your premises and adjust your thoughts – even your perceptions of the world…Thinking is emotionally painful and physiologically demanding, more so than anything else – exept not thinking. But you have to be very articulate and sophisticated to have all this thinking occur inside your own head. What are you to do, then, if you aren’t very good at thinking, at being two people at one time? That’s easy. You talk. But you need someone to listen. A listening person is your collaborator and your opponent […]我倾听的人需要倾诉，因为这就是人们思考的方式。人们需要思考……真正的思考是复杂且费力的。它要求你同时成为清晰的表达者和谨慎、明智的倾听者。它包含冲突。所以你得容忍冲突。冲突涉及协商和妥协。所以，你得学会有舍有得，修改自己的前提，调整自己的想法——甚至对世界的认知……思考在情感上令人痛苦，在生理上也耗费巨大，比任何事情都更甚——除了不去思考。但你得非常善于表达且思维成熟，才能在自己头脑中完成这一切思考。那么，如果你不擅长思考，不擅长同时扮演两个角色，该怎么办呢？这很简单。你得开口说。但你得有人倾听。倾听者是你的合作伙伴，也是你的对手……

The fact is important enough to bear repeating: people organize their brains through conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves. The input of the community is required for the integrity of the individual psyche. To put it another way: it takes a village to build a mind. …事实的重要性足以让人反复强调：人们通过交流来组织自己的思维。如果他们无人倾诉，就会失去理智。就像囤积者一样，他们无法摆脱杂乱。个体心理的健全需要社群的输入。换句话说：塑造一个人的思维需要整个村庄的力量。…

A client of mine might say, “I hate my wife”. It’s out there, once said. It’s hanging in the air. It has emerged from the underworld, materialized from chaos, and manifested itself. It is perceptible and concrete and no longer easily ignored. It’s become real. The speaker has even startled himself. He sees the same thing reflected in my eyes. He notes that, and continues on the road to sanity. “Hold it,” he says. “Back up That’s too harsh. Sometimes I hate my wife. I hate her when she won’t tell me what she wants. My mom did that all the time, too. It drove Dad crazy. It drove all of us crazy, to tell you the truth. It even drove Mom crazy! She was a nice person, but she was very resentful. Well, at least my wife isn’t as bad as my mother. Not at all. Wait! I guess my wife is atually pretty good at telling me what she wants, but I get really bothered when she doesn’t, because Mom tortured us all half to death being a martyr. That really affected me. Maybe I overreact now when it happens even a bit. Hey! I’m acting just like Dad did when Mom upset him! That isn’t me. That doesn’t have anthing to do with my wife! I better let her know.” I observe from all this that my client had failed previously to properly distinguish his wife from his mother. And I see that he was possessed, unconsciously, by the spirit of his father. He sees all of that too. Now he is a bit more differentiated, a bit less of an uncarved block, a bit less hidden in the fog. He has sewed up a small tear in the fabric of his culture. He says “That was a good session, Dr. Peterson.” I nod.我的一位客户可能会说：“我讨厌我妻子。”这话一出口，就悬在了空中。它从阴暗处冒了出来，从混沌中凝结而成，显现了出来。它变得清晰而具体，不再容易被忽视。它已成真。说话者甚至自己都吓了一跳。他从我的眼神中看到了同样的东西。他注意到了这一点，于是踏上了回归理智的道路。“等等，”他说，“退一步说，这话太过了。有时我会讨厌我妻子。她不告诉我她想要什么的时候我就讨厌她。我妈妈也总是这样，这把爸爸逼疯了。说实话，这把我们所有人都逼疯了。甚至把我妈妈自己都逼疯了！她是个好人，但非常记仇。好吧，至少我妻子不像我妈妈那么糟糕。”一点也不。等等！我想我妻子其实挺会跟我讲她想要什么的，可要是她不讲，我就特别烦，因为妈妈总是装出一副受尽委屈的样子，把我们都折磨得够呛。这对我影响挺大的。也许现在哪怕有一点点这种情况，我都会反应过度。嘿！我这表现跟爸爸当年被妈妈气着时一模一样！这可不是我。这跟我妻子没关系！我得让她知道。”从这些话里，我看出我的这位客户之前没能把妻子和母亲区分开来。我还发现他不自觉地被父亲的精神所左右。他也意识到了这一点。现在他更善于区分了，不再像一块未经雕琢的璞玉，也不再像被迷雾笼罩着。他在自己的文化织锦上缝补了一个小口子。他说：“这次咨询挺好的，彼得森医生。”我点点头。

My Plagiarism (a) by Scott Alexander:我的抄袭（a） 作者：斯科特·亚历山大

Sometimes I identify turns of phrase that I’ve picked up from other people. Other times it’s more subtle; a style, a way of looking at the world, a method of reasoning. All of these are just different levels of pattern. My writing style is a slurry of the writing styles of everyone I’ve read and enjoyed, with some pieces chunkier than others. I think my worldview and my reasoning style are too, it’s just less obvious.有时我能发现自己从他人那里学来的某些措辞。还有些时候则更为微妙，比如一种风格、一种看待世界的方式、一种推理方法。所有这些都只是不同层次的模式。我的写作风格是所有我读过且喜欢的作者写作风格的混合体，其中有些影响更为显著。我觉得我的世界观和推理方式也是如此，只是没那么明显罢了。

I worked on a book chapter for 2 months and deleted almost all of it. Feels like the writing equivalent of watching a suffering patient die. It’s sad, but at least the suffering is over. RIP, illogical chapter. (a)我花了两个月写一本书的章节，结果几乎全删了。感觉就像看着一个痛苦挣扎的病人离世。这很令人难过，但至少痛苦结束了。安息吧，不合逻辑的章节。

Selfish Writing (a) by Morgan Housel:《自私写作（一）》 摩根·豪泽尔 著

Writing is the ultimate test of whether your thoughts make sense or are merely gut feelings. Feelings about why something is the way it is don’t need to be questioned or analyzed in your head because they feel good and you don’t want to rock the boat. Putting thoughts onto paper forces them into an unforgiving reality where you have to look at the words as the same symbols another reader will see them as, unaided by the silent crutch of gut feelings.写作是检验你的想法是否合理，还是仅仅出于直觉的最终考验。对于为何事物会是现在这个样子，你内心的感受无需在脑海中质疑或分析，因为它们让你感觉良好，你也不想打破这种平衡。将想法写在纸上，会迫使它们进入一个无情的现实，你必须把它们当作其他读者看到的同样的符号来看待，而不能借助内心直觉这种无声的拐杖。

Good writers don’t walk around all day with 100,000 words of eloquent wisdom in their heads. No one can do that. They take some vague feeling they’ve been thinking about, dig into a bunch, write down what they’ve discovered, realize half of it doesn’t make sense, delete most of it, write some more, realize the new stuff contradicts itself, panic when they realize they don’t understand the topic as well as they thought they did, talk to other smart people about why that is, learn something new that reminds them of this other thing that might tie into the second paragraph, discover that this thing they believed before they started writing isn’t actually true, realize that if that thing isn’t true then this other thing is probably really important, and so on endlessly. Grinding through this process reveals bits of context that are hopefully new discoveries to the reader. More importantly, they were likely new discoveries to the writer before they set out writing.优秀的作家不会整天脑袋里装着十万字的雄辩妙语。没人能做到这一点。他们会把一些一直在思考的模糊感受挖掘出来，写下所发现的东西，然后意识到其中一半都不通顺，删掉大部分内容，再接着写，结果发现新写的内容自相矛盾，当意识到自己对这个主题的理解并不像原本以为的那么透彻时，又会惊慌失措，于是向其他聪明人请教为什么会这样，学到一些新东西，这又让他们想起另一件事，或许能和第二段的内容联系起来，接着发现之前认为的某些东西其实并不正确，意识到如果那件事不对，那么另一件事可能就非常重要，如此这般没完没了。经历这个过程，会逐渐揭示出一些新的背景信息，希望能让读者感到耳目一新。更重要的是，在动笔之前，这些新发现对作者来说也很可能是全新的。

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” (a)所有该说的都已经说过了。但因为没人听，所以一切又得再说一遍。

Curation / aggregation of popular content is highest ROI media work. (a)精选/聚合热门内容是最具投资回报率的媒体工作。（a）

You Should Write Blogs (a)你应该写博客（一）

This is certainly the most important thing I’ll ever say in my blogs: YOU should write blogs.这无疑是我博客中要说的最重要的一句话：你应该写博客。

Even if nobody reads them, you should write them. It’s become pretty clear to me that blogging is a source of both innovation and clarity. I have many of my best ideas and insights while blogging. Struggling to express things that you’re thinking or feeling helps you understand them better.即便无人阅读，你也应该写博客。对我而言，博客已成为创新与清晰思路的源泉。我在写博客时产生了许多最佳的想法和见解。努力表达自己正在思考或感受的事物，有助于更好地理解它们。

I’ve noticed that people at Amazon have a lot of important things to say, but those things are rarely recorded. If you give a brown-bag presentation, or send a thoughtful email to some internal mailing list, you’ll have an impact, but it won’t be anywhere near the impact you’ll have through blogging.我注意到亚马逊的员工有很多重要的想法，但这些想法很少被记录下来。如果你做一场午餐会演讲，或者给某个内部邮件列表发一封有见地的邮件，你确实能产生影响，但这种影响远不及通过写博客所产生的影响大。

I’ve talked with a lot of people who are reluctant to write blogs. Everyone offers pretty much the same reasons: they’re too busy, or they’re afraid to put something on “permanent public record”, or they think nobody will read their blog, or they think blogging is narcissistic. Or they’re worried that they either don’t have anything good to say, or they won’t say it very well.我跟很多不愿写博客的人聊过，他们给出的理由几乎如出一辙：太忙了，或者害怕把东西写进“永久的公开记录”，或者觉得没人会看他们的博客，或者认为写博客是自恋的表现。又或者担心自己没什么好说的，或者即便有也说不好。

I’m here to tell you that none of these reasons should stop you from writing in your blog. I’ll talk about each of them in turn.我在此要告诉你，这些理由都不应成为你停止写博客的阻碍。我会逐一进行阐述。

in my experience the first draft of any paper is so terrible that the advisor does not bother with line comments. I only used to get line comments on the 3rd draft or so and considered myself lucky to get them!! (a)以我的经验来看，任何论文的初稿都糟糕透顶，以至于导师根本不会逐行批改。我通常要到第三稿左右才能得到逐行批改，而且当时还觉得自己很幸运呢！（a）

Thoughts on Meaning and Writing (a):关于意义与写作的思考（一）：

And most importantly, when I’m on my death bed 50+ years from now, I will remember writing my novel. I won’t remember 99.9% of my life, or 99% of the people I meet, or 99.9999% of the meals I ate, but I will remember the story I created. It’s a part of me.最重要的是，五十年后当我躺在临终病床上时，我会记得自己写过小说。我不会记得自己一生中 99.9% 的事情，也不会记得 99% 的人，甚至 99.9999% 的餐食，但我一定会记得自己创作的故事。那是我的一部分。

Maybe that’s what my bullet point heuristic really is. It’s not just a method of creating memories, but a method of creating myself. The important people I know, the passions I’ve pursued, the things I’ve written are as much a part of me as my personality traits, IQ, physique, or anything else. They are what occupy my mind, my time, and my existence, for better or worse.也许这就是我所总结的要点法则的真正意义所在。它不只是创造记忆的方法，更是塑造自我之道。我所认识的重要人物、我所追求的热忱、我所写下的东西，都和我的性格特点、智商、体格或其他任何方面一样，是构成我的一部分。它们占据着我的思想、我的时间以及我的存在，无论好坏。

So I guess I’ll keep writing, for now.所以我想，我目前还是会继续写下去。