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The Heyday of the Writing-first Practitioner: Why Authentic Thinking Matters More in the Age of AI

January 9, 2026 admin Leave a comment

This post synthesizes and builds on Eleanor Warnock’s original article “The Heyday of the Writing-first Practitioner” published in Every (January 8, 2026). The core arguments and examples originate from her work. Read the original article here.

In a world where AI can generate content in seconds, you might think that writing skills have become less valuable. You’d be wrong. In fact, the opposite is happening. According to Eleanor Warnock’s analysis, genuine writers who think through their work are becoming more valuable, not less.

The rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude has commoditized generic content. But it has also made authentic expertise and thoughtful perspective shine brighter than ever. Welcome to 2026—the heyday of the writing-first practitioner.

What is a Writing-first Practitioner?

As Warnock defines it, a writing-first practitioner is someone who writes to think, not just to market. They use writing as a tool for clarity and discovery, developing ideas through the act of putting words on a page. They bring genuine expertise, accumulated judgment, and an authentic voice to their work.

This is fundamentally different from someone who generates content with AI tools without bringing their own thinking to the table.

The Power Players Who Write

According to Warnock’s research, the most successful investors and operators in the world understand this principle deeply:

Fred Wilson, the legendary venture capitalist, started his influential blog back in 2003. Warnock notes that he credits his writing with helping him win deals and refine his investment judgment. His consistent, thoughtful analysis has made him a trusted voice in venture capital for decades.

Julie Zhuo, former VP of Product at Facebook, turned her insights on management into a bestselling book. Warnock points out that she continues to write regularly on Substack, building a community of followers who value her perspective.

Alex Danco, a longtime blogger, was hired by a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) largely because of his public writing, as Warnock documents. His ability to articulate complex ideas earned him a seat at one of the world’s most prestigious venture firms.

Warren Buffett also exemplifies this approach, using clear, direct communication to explain his thinking to shareholders and the public.

These aren’t people who became successful because they wrote a lot—they write because it makes them better thinkers and decision-makers.

Where Writing Creates Disproportionate Leverage

According to Warnock’s analysis, writing isn’t equally valuable in every field. It’s particularly powerful in professions built on expertise and trust. She identifies four situations where writing creates outsized advantage:

1. Results and Track Records Stay Hidden

Warnock explains that in venture capital, it takes a decade to know if someone is a good company picker. An executive coach’s impact on a client’s career might never be shared publicly. In these fields, where results lag behind action, writing becomes an interim signal of competence. It’s a way of saying, “Here’s how I think. Judge me on that.”

2. Profit Opportunities Flow Through Networks

In venture capital and other fields, access to the best deals directly impacts returns. Warnock cites the example of Lulu Cheng Meservey, a communications professional, who raised a $40 million fund partly because her network understood her thinking through her writing. Writing builds credibility and access in ways that resumes never could.

3. Industries Move Fast

In tech and emerging industries, the window to act is short. As Warnock argues, writing forces real-time synthesis. You can’t wait a year to see results—you need to process what’s happening, form a view, and communicate it. This public thinking becomes valuable to peers, investors, and clients who need clarity now.

4. Output is Subjective and Clients Lack Expertise

In design, branding, consulting, and coaching, clients often can’t judge quality directly. They rely on proxies: referrals, reputation, and how someone explains their thinking. Writing establishes the trust that makes someone hireable.

The Article’s Surprising Stance on AI

You might expect an article about writing to warn against AI tools. Instead, Warnock makes a more nuanced argument that surprised many readers: AI tools don’t diminish the value of writing-first practitioners—they sharpen it.

She explains that as AI makes content generation trivially easy, authentic thinking becomes rarer and more valuable. When everyone can generate a blog post with ChatGPT, the ability to write with genuine insight, accumulated expertise, and a cultivated voice becomes a competitive moat.

Warnock specifically notes the paradox: “Writing-first practitioners have always competed on distribution; anyone can start a blog or post on LinkedIn. Now, with AI, they’re competing on production too. As tools like Claude and ChatGPT make it trivially easy to generate content, does the writing-first edge disappear when everyone can write?” Her answer is no—it sharpens.

Can You Be a Writing-first Practitioner While Using AI?

Absolutely, yes—and this is a crucial distinction Warnock makes.

A writing-first practitioner can start with a genuine thought and use AI as a tool to refine, expand, and articulate it more clearly. Using AI to polish your writing, organize your ideas, or find better ways to express your thinking doesn’t disqualify you from this archetype.

The distinction isn’t about avoiding AI. According to Warnock’s framework, it’s about:

Starting with real thinking, not outsourcing your thinking entirely to a machine
Bringing genuine expertise and accumulated judgment to your work
Developing an authentic voice rooted in your perspective

Think of it like a craftsman using modern tools. A carpenter who uses a power saw instead of a handsaw is still a craftsman. Similarly, a writer who uses AI to augment their authentic thinking is still a writing-first practitioner in the sense Warnock describes.

Why 2026 is the Heyday

We’re at an inflection point. For years, as Warnock notes, writing-first practitioners competed on distribution—anyone could start a blog or post on LinkedIn. Now, with AI, they’re competing on production too. Everyone can write.

This is actually good news for genuine thinkers. As the supply of generic content explodes, the demand for authentic perspective soars. Your thoughtful analysis, your accumulated expertise, your real point of view—these are becoming more valuable precisely because they’re becoming scarcer.

The professionals who will thrive in 2026 and beyond, according to Warnock’s thesis, are those who write to think, use tools (including AI) to amplify that thinking, and consistently share their authentic perspective with the world.

The Takeaway

If you’re building a career in a knowledge profession—whether it’s investing, product management, consulting, or coaching—Warnock’s advice is clear: start writing. Not for marketing. Write to think. Develop your ideas in public. Let your authentic expertise shine.

And if you’re worried about AI making your writing less valuable, Warnock suggests you’ve got it backwards. AI is making your authentic thinking more valuable than ever.

The heyday of the writing-first practitioner isn’t ending. According to Warnock’s analysis, it’s just beginning.

Hands-on Leadership, Babur’s Horses, and the Driver in My Life

December 17, 2025 admin Leave a comment

image by author and perplexity.ai

“In my experience, the more you know about something, the less you fear it.” – from the film The Martian

There is a scene in The Martian where Mark Watney survives not by writing strategies in a PowerPoint deck, but by literally getting his hands dirty—growing potatoes in Martian soil, hacking equipment, and fixing things one bolt at a time. That line about knowing more and fearing less captures something essential about being hands on: proximity to the work gives both control and clarity.

An ex–Income Tax officer, a long-standing RSS member who was helping me find clients in my early startup days, once shared an anecdote about Babur that stayed with me. He told me that an RSS article had described how Babur preferred horses over war elephants, seeing elephants as powerful but harder to control because they depended on someone else to handle them, while cavalry gave him more direct, agile command in battle. This interpretation fits Babur’s campaigns in India, where he relied heavily on fast cavalry and firearms rather than elephant corps, and it offers a vivid metaphor for how we choose our tools and roles in modern work.

He made this point while watching me being driven around by my driver at a time when I was actually struggling for work, with more free time than assignments. I still have a driver, but that moment poked a hole in my comfort zone. It forced me to ask a difficult question: was I building a life of horses I could ride, or elephants that always needed someone else to move?

Since then, I have tried to be deliberately hands on in every role. As a project manager, that meant writing code myself, not just tracking timelines and updating status reports. As a digital cinema head, it meant standing inside theatres during installations, understanding how projectors, servers, and sound systems actually came together to create the experience on screen. As a digital head, it meant personally uploading videos and posting on social media instead of only approving campaigns from a distance. And now, it means writing code again—this time with AI applications as my “horses,” responsive tools that move where I nudge them, instead of “elephants” that someone else has to prod into motion.

There is a catch, though. Being hands on can slowly turn into being trapped in the weeds: replying to every email, touching every file, sitting in every meeting. You feel productive and in control, but the bigger picture—market shifts, long-term risks, strategic bets—starts to blur. The same closeness that gives confidence can also shrink your field of vision if you never step back.

So the balance, for me, is this: hands on is still the way to go, but not at the expense of perspective. The goal is to stay close enough to the work that you understand its texture and constraints, yet far enough back that you can see the whole battlefield and choose where to charge. Babur may have preferred horses to elephants, but he still needed a vantage point from which to see his entire army and the shape of the enemy line.

That is the leadership posture worth aiming for: one hand on the reins, the other pointing toward where everyone needs to go.

1-By Laksh, AI, ChatGPT, Grok

Rethinking Happiness: From Chasing Desires to Embracing Meaning

December 2, 2025 admin Leave a comment

In a world obsessed with hustle culture, social-media validation, and endless striving, true fulfillment often feels just out of reach. What if the secret isn’t in acquiring new goals but in letting go of old attachments? What if suffering—rather than something to avoid—holds the key to meaning?

Drawing on the wisdom of Harvard’s Arthur C. Brooks, Jordan Peterson, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, this post explores a counterintuitive truth:

Happiness isn’t a destination. It’s the byproduct of a meaningful life.

The Trap of Endless Wanting: Arthur C. Brooks’ Reverse Bucket List

Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard professor and co-author of Build the Life You Want, discovered that achieving every milestone on his bucket list didn’t deliver lasting satisfaction. He describes reaching his 50s with career prestige, financial stability, and global recognition—yet feeling surprisingly empty.

Why?
Because the brain is engineered for survival, not sustained bliss. Every achievement quickly becomes the new baseline, fueling the “hedonic treadmill.”

Brooks proposes a simple antidote: the reverse bucket list.

Instead of writing down what you want next, you list the desires that are controlling you—especially those tied to ego, comparison, and status.
Then you cross them out.

His formula explains why this works:
Satisfaction = (What You Have) / (What You Want)
Reduce the denominator, and satisfaction increases.

How to Make One

Sit quietly and list 5–10 ego-driven wants.
Strike through each, saying: “This no longer owns me.”
Refocus on Brooks’ four stable pillars: purpose, family, friendship, and meaningful work.

As Brooks puts it:
“Intention is fine, but attachment is bad.”

The Four False Idols: Modern Substitutes for Fulfillment

Brooks draws from St. Thomas Aquinas to identify four distractions that distort our pursuit of happiness: money, power, pleasure, and fame. They appear promising because they satisfy old evolutionary drives—but they ultimately leave us emptier.

Idol	Core Drive	Pitfall	Detachment Tip
Money	Security	Endless comparison	Practice daily gratitude.
Power	Control	Resentment & fear	Empower others.
Pleasure	Escape	Short-lived highs	Pair pleasure with purpose.
Fame	Validation	External identity	Limit metrics & comparison.

Identifying your dominant idol is the first step toward loosening its grip.

Jordan Peterson: Why Happiness Cannot Be the Goal

If Brooks offers gentle tools for detachment, Jordan Peterson offers stark realism:

“Life is suffering.”

In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson argues that happiness is too unstable to serve as a life’s aim. Pain lasts longer than pleasure, chaos is guaranteed, and the brain evolved to prioritize survival over joy.

What sustains us is not momentary happiness but responsibility.

Peterson’s philosophy condenses into six practical principles:

Aim high at something noble.
Take responsibility—begin with manageable order (“clean your room”).
Confront suffering instead of avoiding it.
Tell the truth, including uncomfortable truths about yourself.
Serve others to escape self-absorption.
Commit to the good, even when the world feels irrational.

A bridge to Frankl

Peterson’s core insight mirrors an older philosophical truth:
Suffering is universal—and meaning is what transforms it.

This sets the stage for Viktor Frankl.

Viktor Frankl: Meaning as Humanity’s Lifeline

Viktor Frankl, Jewish psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, developed logotherapy, a system built on the idea that humans are driven not by pleasure (Freud) or power (Adler), but by meaning.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observes that those who endured the camps were often those who held onto a purpose—future work, a loved one, or a belief worth suffering for.

Frankl identifies three sources of meaning:

Creation — contributing or building something.
Experience — love, beauty, nature, art.
Attitude — choosing your response to suffering.

One of his most influential tools is paradoxical intention, a technique where you intentionally exaggerate the fear or symptom causing anxiety.
By leaning into it, the fear loses its power.

Simplified Example

Insomnia: attempting to stay awake rather than trying to force sleep, which removes pressure and allows sleep to return naturally.

Frankl also emphasizes dereflection (shifting attention away from the self) and Socratic dialogue (questioning your beliefs to uncover deeper meaning). These tools help people navigate grief, trauma, and existential despair with dignity and agency.

A Unified Path Forward

Together, Brooks, Peterson, and Frankl offer a three-step blueprint for a meaningful life:

1. Want less.
Detach from ego-driven desires (Brooks).

2. Carry something.
Take responsibility for something that matters (Peterson).

3. Transform suffering.
Choose your attitude and meaning (Frankl).

The world in 2025 may feel chaotic, but meaning is always available. Frankl survived unimaginable suffering by envisioning a future rooted in purpose. We cannot choose our circumstances, but we can always choose our response.

Your Turn: A Simple Reflection to Begin Today

Take a moment and answer:

1. What’s one desire you can strike off your reverse bucket list today?

2. What’s one responsibility you can embrace this week that moves you toward meaning?

Share your reflection below—your insight may help someone else begin their journey too.

Laksh Online