We asked, you answered: What’s your favorite writing advice?
🎂 It’s September 27, which means happy birthday to Carrie Brownstein, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lil Wayne, Avril Lavigne, and many other fascinating people!
Issue #172: Vitalik Buterin demystifies “decentralization,” and process v. results
By Harris Sockel
Two days ago, in a distant land called Wednesday, we asked you to share your favorite piece of writing wisdom. There are over 837,000 stories about writing on Medium — we can’t sift through all that ourselves! Here’s what you had to say.
Rhea Barden recommends setting a simple word limit: e.g., 500 words a day. I’ve never done this, but I know a bunch of people who have! In a podcast with Ava Huang, one of my favorite writers, she explains that once she set a goal of 1K words/day and started doing it — just getting the words out, even if they were garbage — her life changed.
It’s like this Kurt Vonnegut quote, via Bridget Cougar:
If you can write one short story a week — it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done.
Many of you emailed us to say “read it aloud!” Hans recommends never starting at the beginning. Writer Jerry Michalski sent us his entire second brain — featuring Philip Hamburger’s “ass on chair” mantra. And Mernie Buchanan defaults to “peer pressure and feedback!” Her writers group meets for two hours every week at the library. “Any other hack is secondary to [joining a writers group]. Really.”
One more tip, which I loved, via chemist and research software engineer Madeleine Sutherland: Write your paper (or blog post) as a children’s story first. It’ll help you simplify your ideas, and you can always add detail later.
🔗 From the archive: demystifying “decentralization”
Seven years ago, Vitalik Buterin, the programming prodigy who co-founded Ethereum at 19, turned to Medium to clear the air about what “decentralization” actually means. It’s not as simple as “a system with no single owner” — that’s unspecific and doesn’t capture the nuances of a blockchain.
Instead, there are three types of decentralization:
- Architectural: It’s spread over multiple computers.
- Political: Multiple individuals control the system. No one person can make the entire network do what they want.
- Logical: The way it works differs across various parts of the system.
The English language, for example, is decentralized on all three axes (no central “owner,” and the rules are inconsistent and always evolving). Most corporations are centralized on all three. Blockchains are ⅔ decentralized: architectural and political decentralization combined with logical centralization.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on process vs. results
A good process — intentional work, day after day — will always get you further than a big shiny goal.
Quiz: Zoom In
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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