Something humbling happened last week: three hours of my life disappeared into a blank document with barely a paragraph to show for it.
I sat down to write a product strategy document – something I thought I’d mastered after years of practice. In meetings, I can usually help teams navigate the tough questions: what to build next, how features connect to business goals, which metrics matter most. I’ve built a career partly on my ability to clarify complex concepts and find structure in ambiguity.
But three hours into staring at that blank screen, I had barely written a paragraph. The ideas that sounded so clear in my head fell apart the moment I tried to put them into words.
It wasn’t writer’s block. It was something more fundamental – a gap between what I thought I understood and what I could actually articulate clearly.
And that gap made me wonder: How often do we convince ourselves we understand something when we really don’t?
The Illusion of Understanding
This experience forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: I didn’t understand the topic nearly as well as I thought I did.
We all carry this illusion that we understand things. Our brains are masterful at creating a sense of coherence – connecting dots, filling gaps, smoothing contradictions. Until we try to explain those thoughts to someone else.
As I was wrestling with this realization, I came across Dustin Curtis’s essay “Thoughts on thinking.”1 Reading it was one of those moments where someone articulates something you’ve been feeling but couldn’t quite put into words.
Curtis describes how, in our AI-saturated world, our thinking muscles can atrophy. He writes about feeling “stuck” because the ease of generating AI content has “sucked the fun out of the process of creation.” What resonated most with me was his observation that using AI “feels like work, but it’s not real work” because “intellectual rigor comes from the journey: the dead ends, the uncertainty, and the internal debate.”
This exactly captures the gap I see all the time in organizations. You sit in a meeting where someone outlines a strategy that sounds completely reasonable. Everyone nods. Decisions get made. Actions get taken. Six months later, it’s a dumpster fire, and everyone’s wondering what happened.
What happened is that nobody forced the thinking through the clarifying filter of having to articulate it precisely. They took shortcuts around the necessary struggle.
I’ve seen this movie too many times. Hell, I’ve starred in it.
Writing as Thinking
This is why I’ve come back to writing after years away.
Not because I particularly enjoy it. Not because I think my thoughts are so important. But because writing is the most reliable tool I’ve found for figuring out what I actually think.
Here’s what my writing process actually looks like:
- Think I understand something
- Try to write about it
- Realize I don’t understand it at all
- Feel stupid and frustrated
- Do more research, more thinking
- Try writing again
- Discover new gaps in my understanding
- Repeat steps 4-7 until something clicks
- Finally produce something that feels honest
Is this efficient? Absolutely not. It’s messy, frustrating, and time-consuming.
Is it effective? Yes. Because by the end, I actually understand something in a way I didn’t before.
The Public Accountability Difference
And here’s the thing: private writing isn’t enough.
Yes, a personal journal helps clarify thinking. But there’s a different level of intellectual rigor when you know others will read your words.
Publishing creates accountability. It’s the difference between exercising alone versus at the gym where others can see you. You push harder. You get more honest with yourself.
When I write knowing no one will see it, I let myself off the hook. I gloss over hard parts. I allow vague statements to stand.
But when I write for an audience, everything changes. There’s this voice saying, “Someone’s going to call bullshit on that,” or “You’re hand-waving instead of doing the work.”
This public accountability isn’t about ego. It’s about raising the bar for your own thinking.
From Page to Stage
And if I’m being truly honest with myself, writing isn’t even enough.
The next frontier I need to tackle is getting back on stage. Giving talks. Leading workshops. Standing in front of rooms full of people who can challenge me in real time.
I’ve been avoiding this. It’s easier to hide behind a keyboard than face immediate reactions. But the clarity that comes from explaining complex ideas out loud, with human faces looking back at you, is unmatched.
Product management is fundamentally a communication discipline. We can have the best ideas in the world, but if we can’t articulate them clearly – if we can’t make others understand and care – those ideas die. The best PMs I know are exceptional communicators, whether in writing, one-on-one, or addressing hundreds.
Public speaking forces a different kind of clarity than writing. When you write, you can revise endlessly. When you speak, you get one shot. That constraint creates a brutal forcing function for your thinking. You can’t hide behind vague language when you have to say something out loud to actual humans.
Every time I’ve pushed myself to give a talk, I’ve discovered gaps in my thinking that writing alone didn’t reveal. There’s something about synthesizing ideas into a narrative that others can follow in real-time that pushes you to a deeper level of understanding.
The AI Temptation
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.
I feel that weird guilt – that people might assume AI wrote my stuff. I get it. I’ve played with these tools. They’re impressive.
The temptation is real. When I’m stuck on a paragraph, why not just prompt an AI and let it crank out something that sounds smarter than what I’m struggling to articulate?
Because that would miss the entire point.
I’m not writing to create content. I’m writing to clarify my thinking. Using AI to skip the struggle would be like hiring someone to do my push-ups.
Curtis captures this feeling perfectly. He describes how he initially thought he was using AI “in an incredibly positive and healthy way, as a bicycle for my mind,” but eventually realized that while AI has given him more information than ever before, he feels “slightly dumber” and “more dull” because he’s getting “finished thoughts, polished and convincing, but none of the intellectual growth that comes from developing them myself.”
This distinction matters more than ever. We’re entering an era where sounding knowledgeable is becoming trivially easy. AI can help anyone appear thoughtful. But appearing thoughtful and being thoughtful are worlds apart.
I want to be someone who genuinely understands complex ideas, not someone who’s good at prompting an AI to generate coherent paragraphs about them.
The Meaning Behind the Struggle
So what does this all add up to?
I’ve recommitted to writing – and soon, to speaking – not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. Because that difficulty serves a purpose. It reveals the gaps in my understanding. It forces me to confront what I don’t know.
Maybe you write regularly. Maybe you don’t. But I bet you’ve felt that gap between what you think you know and what you actually know.
Here’s my suggestion: embrace the gap. Use it as a compass.
When you hit that point where your understanding falls apart – where you can’t explain something clearly – that’s not failure. That’s the beginning of actual learning. It’s the moment when the real work starts.
In a world flooded with content but starving for clarity, the ability to think deeply matters. And writing – real writing, the kind that hurts your brain – is one of the best paths to that kind of thinking.
So I’ll keep staring at blank screens. I’ll keep writing terrible first drafts. I’ll keep feeling that frustration when the words don’t come.
Because that struggle isn’t separate from the thinking process. It is the thinking process.
And thinking, real thinking, is worth the discomfort.