How writing makes you a stronger leader

The underrated edge of high performers: Writing as a discipline 

I’ve been fortunate to work alongside some of the most capable thinkers, analysts and operators — from astrophysics and academia to intelligence teams in national security and product teams in cybersecurity startups. Across these worlds, one lesson has stood out again and again. 

It’s not always the most charismatic or technically brilliant people who succeed. I’ve seen plenty of both. But I’ve also seen many of them hold themselves back because they never developed one critical habit: the discipline of writing. 

The most capable leaders and operators I’ve known all share this discipline. They don’t write to impress — they write to clarify their thinking, test their ideas and open themselves up to challenge and improvement. 

In an age where AI is automating more routine knowledge work, this human edge matters more than ever. The people who will thrive are those who get the most from their limited cognitive resources — and know how to combine them with AI to sharpen their thinking. Writing is one of the most powerful and still underused tools we have. 

The brain’s hidden bottleneck 

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your brain is running on limited hardware. 

To understand why this matters, consider the three key components of human memory: 

1. Short-term memory: the mental clipboard 

Short-term memory is a temporary holding tank. It can store small amounts of information — a phone number, a new name or a phrase — for seconds to a minute. But it’s fragile and fades quickly without reinforcement. 

In a famous 1956 paper, psychologist George A. Miller argued that the number of things we can keep in mind at once is surprisingly small — just 7 ± 2.  

2. Long-term memory: the vast, messy archive 

Long-term memory is our long-term persistent storage; however, long-term memory doesn’t just store facts — it stores interpretations. 

Rather than acting like a hard drive that captures raw data, your brain is constantly compressing experiences into meaningful chunks, shaped by what you already know. This process helps you learn and retrieve faster, but it comes at a cost: memories are filtered, biased and often incomplete. 

In a classic study by Frederic Bartlett (1932), participants were asked to recall a Native American folk story. Over time, they unknowingly distorted or omitted details that didn’t fit their cultural expectations — changing unfamiliar elements into ones that made more sense to them. Bartlett concluded that memory is shaped by schemas: mental frameworks we use to interpret and make sense of the world. 

This shows how memory is less about preserving what was and more about recording what made sense to us at the time. It’s optimized for meaning, not fidelity. 

Our memories aren’t neatly filed away — they’re stored in a web of associations, linked by meaning and experience. You’ve likely experienced it: a smell instantly takes you back twenty years to being a teenager.  

Memory works by cues, not commands. One thought sparks another, lighting up connected ideas in a network shaped by what matters to us. Writing helps trace those threads, making the invisible links visible. 

3. Working memory: the narrow mental workspace 

Working memory is where the thinking happens. It’s your mental workbench, pulling in bits from short-term memory — what you just saw, heard or read — and combining them with fragments from long-term memory to help you reason, solve problems and make decisions. Most of this happens automatically and unconsciously, as your brain tries to juggle ideas and weigh possibilities in real time. 

But the space is small. We can typically hold only 4–7 items in working memory at once. And even what we draw in from long-term memory comes with baggage: distorted impressions, forgotten details and built-in biases. 

The problem isn’t just that working memory is small — it’s that we rely on it to do our most important thinking. But it’s trying to integrate fleeting input from short-term memory with imperfect, biased content from long-term memory — all in a space that can barely hold a handful of ideas at once. That makes working memory not just limited, but fragile. And unless we find ways to support and extend it, we’re likely to mistake the ease of thinking for the quality of thought. 

The illusion of coherence 

Because working memory is limited, we often rely on mental shortcuts — favoring familiar narratives and assumptions. This can create an illusion of coherence, where our thinking feels thorough but is actually constrained by unchallenged beliefs. 

A striking historical example is France’s reliance on the Maginot Line before World War II. Designed to prevent a German invasion, this extensive fortification embodied France’s expectation of a repeat of World War I tactics. However, in 1940, German forces bypassed the line through the Ardennes Forest, leading to France’s rapid defeat. 

“The Maginot Line was a triumph of engineering and a failure of thinking.” — Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France 

This episode underscores how unexamined mental models can lead to strategic failures. Without tools to challenge and test our thinking, we risk overconfidence, blind spots and flawed decisions. 

Writing as cognitive augmentation 

This is where writing becomes essential. 

Writing expands our extremely limited working memory. It externalizes your thinking, so you don’t have to juggle every idea in your head at once. With your thoughts on the page, you can step back, zoom out and work with more complexity than your brain alone can handle. 

Richard Feynman (the legendary Nobel Prize-winning scientist) famously explained that he didn’t know what he thought about something until he wrote it out or taught it. In response to somebody commenting on his notebooks, that they are a “wonderful record of his day-to-day work,” Richard Feynman replied, “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” 

Writing is not just about documenting what we think — it’s how we build, test and improve what we think. Drafting and revising sharpen both the argument on the page and the mental model behind it. 

The takeaway: Write to lead, write to win 

There are powerful tools and mental models that can help you think more clearly, write more effectively and make better decisions. One of the best starting points is Richards Heuer’s The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Originally written for intelligence professionals, it offers practical strategies for challenging assumptions, avoiding bias and applying structured analytic techniques — the very skills that all thoughtful leaders need. 

You’ll also find a deeper understanding of our mental blind spots in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which explores the two systems of thought — fast, intuitive judgments and slower, more deliberate reasoning. When we rely too heavily on fast thinking, we fall into familiar traps like confirmation bias and the illusion of coherence. Writing is a way to slow our thinking down — to engage our more reflective, analytical selves. 

In an age when AI is taking over many low-level tasks, clear, human thinking remains one of our greatest advantages. And writing is one of the most powerful ways to exercise it. 

If you want to lead more effectively — whether as an operator, analyst or CISO — don’t just think more. 

Pick up a humble pen keyboard and write more. 

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