On Writing and Meetings

Brad Feld posts about why he writes for an hour each day:

Finally, after almost 20 years of writing, the light bulb went on for me.

I write to think.

Forcing myself to sit down and work through these ideas in a logical sequence for an audience of readers required me to refine my thinking on how I invest in startups. How could I make the financing process more efficient? What’s the best way to structure a deal? I learned a lot, both from my writing and my readers’ responses.

I also love this gem on Jeff Bezos from Brad's post:

Consider Jeff Bezos’s approach to meetings. Whoever runs the meeting writes a memo no longer than six pages about the issue at hand. Then, for the first 15 to 30 minutes of the meeting, the group reads it. The rest of the meeting is spent discussing it. No PowerPoint allowed. Brilliant. (I’ve long felt that PowerPoint is a terrible substitute for critical thinking.)

This aligns nicely with what Edward Tufte says:

PowerPoint... usually weaken(s) verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt(s) statistical analysis.