Writing lessons from Jeff

It's been almost 2 years(!) since I started working here, and if there's one thing I've learned it is the art of writing a convincing narrative. I wouldn't go as far as to say that I've mastered it, but I've gotten good at it to a point where I no longer have to rewrite entire drafts.

As with any good company, the culture of writing narratives flows from the top down. And the practice of writing narratives as opposed to doing bullet point presentations has been around since the beginning. 

Jeff is a compelling writer.  You can see how much thought goes into writing each year's shareholders letter. You can find an archive of them here. The 2018 shareholders letter (pdf) is a lesson on writing clear narratives. It is data driven, speaks to the point, free of drivel, and stands true to the fact that a good document should tell you a story; a story, when read from beginning to end, lays down everything that you need to know, including the conclusions that were drawn, so you can form your own understanding of the conclusions. This is important as opposed to an open-ended document—especially those as critical as an investor letter—which leaves the conclusions to be drawn to the reader's imagination. That's the job of an op-ed, not a narrative that's trying to lay down facts and statistics.

At Amazon, instead of making presentations or giving talks with jotted down notes, we write what are six-page memos. It's not just leadership, even on the engineering side, design documents are six pagers. These memos are very effective for both parties—the writer and the reader. Your first reaction to this is probably that writing a narrative instead of making slides is a more taxing and a process that takes longer. That's true. Writing narratives as opposed to making slides take longer, but that's not inherently a bad thing. Writing a narrative helps me articulate my design well. If I cannot communicate my design via a narrative, it means there are gaps in my understanding/formulation of the same. For the readers, it gives them a coherent understanding of the problem, approach, pros and cons, along with an appendix of material. This helps them to attack the problem with almost as good an understanding of it as the writer—sometimes better, because they come in with some prior knowledge.  In an hour-long meeting, the first fifteen-twenty minutes are spent reading the narrative, and the rest of the time is spent by the stakeholders of the document/design going over the narrative section by section recording feedback/disagreements/changes. This, according to me, is the best way to deconstruct any proposal that one is interested in getting the stakeholders to be thrilled about.

If you ever did a project or had to write a thesis back when you were in school, you likely had to give a talk besides writing a report on the same. Go back to the few days/hours before the talk, when you were making the slides, and compare it with the time it took you to write the actual report. The former would likely seem like a trivial amount of time compared to the latter. This is because writing coherent narratives is hard. Not—only—because there's a lot more to write, but because it inherently puts you in a place where you cannot omit details or be vague about things. This is important because you need to present a complete picture to the reader. Your slideshow could omit details or be purposefully vague about things because you're going to be present to use the slideshow as a talking point. However, when someone is reading your narrative/report/thesis—which is going to live long after you've left the room—they do not expect you to stand around adding context to each unclear assertion or defending each claim. Your document should be doing that. Once your document is complete, it should become independent of the writer.

This is what a six-page narrative accomplishes and forces you to get right. There are certain valuable lessons you learn over time, mainly as a result of writing enough of these narratives and getting feedback on the writing besides feedback on the content itself. I think I've learned a few good lessons while there's plenty more to learn. But the delta between a bad document and a decent document is huge, while what makes a decent document a great document is intricate and the delta is small. To communicate well, you simply have to be a good writer, not a great one. Your design document need not be the next bestseller, but it should not be abysmal. This is because the time the stakeholders spend reading your document is the only chance you have to present a complete picture of what you're proposing. The rest of the meeting as I'd mentioned would revolve around what's been presented rather than what's missing. In other words, your narrative sets the agenda for the meeting. 

Some of the lessons apply generally—not just in engineering or management—and would help you have better conversations even in your personal life. I say so because it has helped me communicate better outside of work as well.

• Have a data-driven discussion. Every single detail or claim you present in your narrative should be backed by data. You cannot simply say a design or a product or a process would achieve something without providing context on how you arrive at that claim. Being data-driven cuts down the time it takes for your stakeholders to arrive at a point where they trust your claims. For instance, if you say caching the results of an API call would help improve the latencies in your overall system, layout metrics and graphs that show that the uncached API call is actually a bottleneck.
• As an extension, data-driven thinking helps you avoid the X-Y problem. If your proposal shows—with the help of data—that what you're proposing solves something meaningful, you can then easily convince the stakeholders that you're not solving the wrong problem. In a fast-paced industry, solving the wrong problem at the wrong could prove to be expensive. 
• As with writing code, while writing documents, do not repeat yourself. It is easy to do so while making a slideshow because nobody's keeping track of what you're speaking. There's no way for your audience to rewind in real time to verify whether you made the same claim—or worse, a contradictory claim—a few minutes back. If you provide your audience with a narrative, this is no longer a problem as your reader can verify whether you're repeating or presenting contradictory views by simply going back to a previous section in the document. It also helps you reaffirm your claims, and avoid making a fool of yourself.
• Avoid weasel words. Weasel words are in direct contention with a data-driven discussion. An example of such a statement would be "This solution X greatly improves the performance of the system compared to this other solution Y." Great, you've given me no meaningful information. Is the improvement 10% or 10x? Did you purposefully present a terrible solution in Y so you can make X look that much more efficient? What is greatly improves for one stakeholder could be slightly more efficient to another. Give the readers a common ground. Your readers are going to be on different planes when it comes to understanding things. It is your job as the writer to ensure that the planes have as much overlap as possible. Otherwise, the meeting is going to be spent getting your audience on the same page, which should be the job of your narrative. If that happens even after you presented a narrative, it signifies your failure as a writer.
• Diagrams are important. A picture really does speak a thousand words. Especially while describing a workflow, or a new system, it helps to paint a picture so the reader does not have to imagine it. It is especially important to ensure that you don't let the wide spectrum of imagination across your audience derails your discussion. Feed everything to your audience so they aren't shifting to different planes unless they are actively trying to.
• Provide an appendix and use it generously. After you've added a passage or a metric or an argument, ask yourself whether it needs to be in the document. I say after because it is hard for you to gauge beforehand whether or not something belongs in a document without actually trying to fit it in the document. This is in line with my previous point. Do not imagine something if you don't have to. Put the passage or the metric or the reference in the document, then decide whether or not it needs to be there.

The writing exercise takes a few months to get good at, but once you're comfortable writing narratives, you retain that skill forever. I often say that this practice is something that'll make me stick with my company for a long time, and I don't say it without reason.

On Reading

In 2016, I read nine books. Surprisingly, in 2014 and 2015 I seem to have read over fifteen books. 2015 was a good year because I'd purchased a Kindle and it had singlehandedly improved my reading by miles. All three years I set out to read 15-20 books and track them as part of the Goodreads challenge but did not meet my target even on a single occurrence.

In 2017, I set out to read 20 books. I knew I would come close because since I moved to Seattle in the summer of '16 I have been a regular at the Seattle Public Library. It has been my place of refuge, my happy place, a temple, all in one. I'll finish my year having read more than 35 books. 

That number is huge for me. Mainly for someone who did not grow up devouring books like some of my friends. I'm envious of them. However, I figured that reading, just like any other hobby can be developed at a later age as well if one puts their mind to it. And so I did. I read every day. Not just books but articles, long-form, profiles, reviews, and anything with good prose. All said I would have easily spent over 1000 hours this year reading. And the scale of it boggles my mind but it has been a snowball effect. I wanted to make something a habit and stick with it as a means to distract myself from certain things I wanted to distance myself from. And I guess I was pretty successful at it. It was an incredible year for me just in terms of the sheer variety of content that I got to read. Writing is perhaps one thing that brings me more joy than reading. And reading enough gives me enough depth and understanding of various subjects that I'd otherwise never get to understand., That in turn puts me in a good spot when I open a blank page and want to sound smart. So lesson # 1, if you want to see progress make it a habit and attack it in small chunks. There were days when I spent as little as fifteen minutes reading but I made it a point to read something or the other every day. It didn't matter whether it was a book or a magazine article. I just focused on the habit instead of worrying about targets. The Goodreads goal was a means to achieve my end goal -- read more.

In this post, I discuss my favorite books from what I read this year.

If you ask me what my most favorite book is or what my most favorite song is, my answer would vary based on what point I am in life. Sometimes I've given different answers on the same day even. This is to say that my favorites keep changing. However, this year has a clear winner for the most favorite book. Late Dr. Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air was easily my favorite book of the year. I was so moved by the book that I went back and re-read several passages to make sure I took in the feeling of reading those knowing what happened at the end. The book was so full of hope and compassion, and I simply do not have the ability to imagine how hard it must have been for someone to write a book like that with a terminal illness hanging over their head. Yet, Dr. Kalanithi managed to leave something for us all, especially his newborn daughter, to feel hopeful about life. I liked this book so much that I wrote a whole post on it. 

A close second is the late Ms. Marina Keegan's The Opposite of Loneliness. My obsession with Keegan's writing started when my friend introduced me to her essay. Keegan died in a car crash less than a week after that essay was published. That essay left me haunted. When I learnt that everything she'd written till then was collected and published posthumously, I immediately got my hands on that book and what great writing it was! Every single essay was so thoughtful and full of amazing prose that it was almost impossible for me to believe that some of them were simply class assignments. I'm thankful to my friend for introducing me to Keegan and her world of incredible prose.

The most interesting book I read this year was Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now. Johnson takes you through time and tells you the stories of the most important things that shaped civilization. I'm a sucker for trivia and this book was full of stories rich in trivia. Ranging from how they lifted buildings in Chicago so the city could have a sewer system to a table of everyone who had patented an idea of the light bulb before Edison, the book was chock full of extremely interesting stories. If you have even a passing interest in science or history of modern civilization I would strongly recommend you check this out. It keeps you hooked and is a very easy read. So much so that you wouldn't notice how fast you're devouring it.

The work of fiction that will remain very close to my heart from this year is Wonder by R.J. Palacio. I read it before there were talks of a movie (I'm cool like that) so I went in with not very many expectations. The book blew my mind. I'm a sucker for narratives and the book dealt with perspectives so well that it was almost like me sitting next to the characters and listening to them talk. The book reminded me so much of another book I'd read years ago, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Both books deal with children who find it difficult to cope with the world they live in, and both are so wonderfully written and do a great job of ensuring we feel compassion and understanding rather than feeling sympathy for the kids. I'm so glad Wonder was made into a movie and from what I hear from people who've caught it, it is well made.

Two books that made me laugh a lot were Kory Stamper's Word by Word and Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project. I absolutely relished every word of Word by Word (pun intended). Again, I'm a sucker for trivia and the book was full of great trivia. Stamper takes us through the life of a dictionary editor, and it was an amazing window into how much work it takes before a word is officially accepted as a word. Rosie Project, on the other hand, I took some time to warm up to. It was a book that started slowly and one I felt tried to please the reader so much but all of that was shattered as I got more invested in the book. That was the first time in a long time when I realized it has been forever since I genuinely laughed reading a story. If you need quick, light reads that will get you in a good mood I would totally recommend these two.

I read only one book in Tamil this year and that kind of makes me sad. But it was a book that equates to several. It was Na. Mutthukumar's Anilaadum Munril. It is a collection of essays that Mutthukumar wrote about blood relatives which originally came out as a series in a magazine. I realized albeit a bit late that his prose is as fascinating as his poetry. Every essay is a gem worth going back to several times. Especially the one on his son.

This year I got to read several works by Indian writers. Most favorite was, of course, Baradwaj Rangan's book on Mani Ratnam. I also got to read my first Sidin Vadukut book and it was a pretty quick, interesting read. It turns out that the book is not set in his usual genre - humor - but is a crime thriller. I'm looking forward to reading his earlier works in 2018.

Perhaps the most interesting work by an Indian writer I read this year was a graphic novel titled Kari by Amruta Patil. The protagonist is a queer female character who shares her name with the title of the book. It was my first graphic novel in a very long time and the subject, and the story arc left me very intrigued. It was unlike anything I'd read and even as I describe how I felt about the book I'm finding it difficult to pinpoint what exactly I found interesting or intriguing about the book. My inability to articulate my feelings about the book is very similar to the confusions Kari has about life and the people in it.

There it is, my favorite reads of the year. I read several other interesting books - No Country For Old Men and Three Body Problem. for instance. I was fortunate enough that almost all the books that I read this year were incredible and I could write pages and pages about each of them. But I need to stop somewhere. If you're further interested in finding out what else I read or read more about how I felt about these books you can check out my year of reading on Goodreads here. While you're at it, go ahead and add me as your friend on Goodreads as I'm constantly on the lookout for new book recommendations and people to chat about books.

The title of this post was itself inspired by the title of a book from one of my favorite writers -- On Writing by Stephen King.