What I've Been Thinking About
🤝 Leave it better than you found it
When it comes to interacting with a shared resource or environment, whether someone lent you their car, or you're staying in someone's spare bedroom, a simple yet profound rule to follow is to leave it better than you found it.
This rule should extend beyond the physical and into the realm of knowledge and ideas.
What does it mean to leave knowledge and ideas better than you found them? I think it means you should provide a new perspective, simplify, and/or make it easier to understand. I don't necessarily think this means we should feel pressured to make groundbreaking statements every time we write, but we should strive to do our best while having this intention.
People largely believe that the difficulty of a topic is an inherent trait. But that couldn't be further from the truth. For everything we deem to be easy today, it was likely at some point very difficult. Take addition, multiplication, the concept of rent or taxes, how to shoot a basketball, etc. When these things were first conceived, it required a large amount of expertise to discuss them. The difficulty of something only decreases by subsequent people "leaving it better than they found it."
When it comes to writing, the world of academia seems to train us in the exact opposite direction. Asking us to take something simple and expand it into something 5 pages long and much more complex than it needs to be. We're encouraged to use a wide range of vocabulary, even if it comes at the expense of being able to understand our writing. We sit with a thesaurus open, trying to find new ways to make something easy sound difficult.
School has ingrained the terrible habit of making things more complex than when we found them. We’re trained to believe more words are better than fewer.
Next time you write, whether for fun, taking notes, or something required for work, see if you can leave it better than you found it for the next person (even if that person is your future self), I'm sure they'll appreciate it.