The Urge to Write

"What you write stays"

One of the things I'm looking forward to doing more in 2026 is writing more things down and that is why I'm resurrecting my blog. I think it will help me improve in different areas of my life given the results I have had from it this year and below are some of my arguments for this.

Writing makes things stick

In a quest to get my first tech job, I learned a lot of concepts about Python when I read the HeadFirst Python book for the interviews. Of all the things I learned, I only wrote about one topic, comprehensions in python. I spent 6 years without writing a single line of python but when I did again this year, I figured that I still remember almost everything about comprehension in Python. The other concepts didn't stick the same way though. I have to look them up if I'm to use them. This made me realize that writing about things helps you understand them better and makes them stick.

Writing improves how you think

In 2010, I sat for my UCE examinations. I was good at sciences and math but I sucked at History and other subjects where I had to read and write stories. At the beginning of the year, we got a new teacher for the English language. Back then, we had two exams for English, Paper one had a section where you had to choose one of six topics and write a composition of 500-600 words. For some unknown reason, this new teacher focused on this alone, she would make us write compositions week in week out, I even ended up getting 2 buddies I used to compete with for better essays, we used to learn new words, proverbs and idioms and make sure we used them in our next essays. I was not only writing essays but training my brain how to think and plan, learning new things about the language and having fun with it. My English got better and ended up getting a D1. My gut feeling tells me this helped me improve at the subjects I sucked at. I ended up passing history with a distinction when exam time came, since my tolerance for reading stories had improved. And I owe this to writing.

Writing down frees your mind

One of the things I have been doing this year is to write about each and every implementation I work on. I could write down the approach and learnings from each. This has reduced the rate at which I think about work when not working, I don't have to remember what I have to do. Plus when I wanted to have a conversation about my work with my manager, I had a repository of information to refer to.

Writing brings clarity

One thing school taught me about problem solving is how you approach each problem. For example when solving math problems, you could solve the simple ones just in your mind, but for harder problems, you had to write the solution down, and the solution would become clearer as you write it down step by step. This applies to most of the challenges at work and in life, it's even more important in life than school because most of the problems you work on at school are clearly defined and its sometimes not the case for work and life especially if you are working on something non trivial. Paul Graham did a better job explaining this in his essay Putting ideas into words

After writing less in the past couple of years. I could sense the difference in the way I approached, thought about, and communicated problems especially when it came to complex topics. I'd say this has improved over the course of this year when I started writing down things again more often.

So here's to 2026—a year of writing more, thinking clearer, and sharing what I learn along the way.

If you've been putting off writing, this is your sign to start. Write that blog post, document that project, or just jot down what you learned today. What you write stays.

Happy New Year! 🎉