You Should Write Blogs

Eighteen months into his internal Amazon blog, Steve answers every excuse he's heard for not writing — too busy, too permanent, too narcissistic, nobody will read it, nothing to say, won't say it well — and under each excuse plants the same observation: the value of the blog post is not its audience. The value is the work the writing does on the writer; struggling to express an idea is how the idea becomes clear. The central anecdote is his colleague Jacob Gabrielson's "Zero Config" paper. Jacob wrote up a problem everyone at Amazon was suffering from but nobody had elevated to a first-class problem, circulated it, and almost nobody read it. Eight months later Steve started hearing the phrase "config problem" in meetings; within a year it had permeated the VP layer and was setting strategy. The point is the lag: word of mouth drives adoption for essays on much longer time scales than the writer can stand to wait.

The advice itself is small. Write for one person, the way Vonnegut said. Write honestly. Don't advertise. Don't try to be funny if you're not. Don't worry whether anyone is reading. It's an early statement of the principle that drove every later Steve essay — the writing is the thinking, and the thinking is the work — and the foundational piece of a case he kept making for twenty years across three blogs and one book.