“Writing is the best investment for ordinary people” is one of Raymond Hou’s recurring convictions. When asked which single skill he would keep from a decade of independent work, he chose writing. He is concerned less with elegant prose or becoming an author than with turning tacit knowledge—what only one person knows from experience—into an explicit asset that can be found, copied, and shared beyond its original time and place. One experience can then keep doing useful work.
The argument: turn tacit knowledge into an asset
Raymond defines writing as clearly communicating what is in one’s head to another person. For him it is fundamentally communication and recordkeeping, not literary creation. Messages, reports, and proposals written during an ordinary workday are all forms of writing. The difference is whether they are discarded after use or kept in a form that others can reuse.
Two ideas follow. The first is turning knowledge into a product: writing makes expertise and experience visible to a market, a manager, or a future opportunity, allowing that expertise to work even when its author is absent. The second is leverage on time: documenting a solution once may save time each time the same problem returns, for both the writer and others. Raymond describes this as broadcasting the same experience many times, or allowing a single period of work to create value repeatedly.
Three common misconceptions
Raymond identifies three beliefs that keep people from writing. The first is “I am not a good enough writer.” He points to his own plain, direct style: effective writing is clear communication, not ornament, and explaining one thing well is already valuable. The second is “I have nothing unusual to share.” A problem that colleagues have asked about, or one that a person has solved, is already material worth recording. The third is “writing takes too much time.” Raymond suggests treating it as an investment instead of a cost, because a written solution can repay that time later.
From capturing notes to creative freedom
Raymond’s method has two layers. The entry point is “record first, create later.” He sees perfectionism as a major obstacle and the thought “I don’t need to write this down; I’ll remember it” as a frequent self-deception. Recording starts the thinking process. He also advocates learning through teaching: publish notes while learning, even if one is only a day ahead of the reader.
The second layer is creative freedom, an idea he developed after running a content subscription for a time.1 He observed that stockpiling drafts or simply increasing output does not fully explain a sustainable writing practice. Like a marathon runner, a creator needs a workable pace and room to write for personal reasons alongside work written for readers. His practical methods include treating the deadline as the day to execute, protecting writing time in a calendar, separating drafting from editing, and finishing before polishing.2 With AI in the process, he divides the steps further: personal perspective and lived experience stay with the human writer; AI may help edit; final review returns to the writer.
Evidence and limits
Raymond traces several opportunities to writing. In 2015, sharing short learning notes on Facebook led to his first teaching opportunity. From 2017, he published long-form pieces on Medium. Fewer than one hundred people viewed each article in his first year, but the collection later became a portfolio that contributed to a job offer from an international company and a TEDx speaking invitation. In 2019, continued writing led to an invitation to speak on a knowledge platform’s livestream with an audience of more than ten thousand. He has said that many of these opportunities came through people finding his writing, rather than through direct pitches.
He also describes the limits of the idea. Writing speed is a poor measure of quality, and an unthinking commitment to publish every day can become a trap. Writing is a long-term investment, whose value depends on sustained accumulation rather than immediate results. If the work turns into an empty routine or chases traffic at the expense of the writer’s own perspective, a high output does not guarantee the compounding value he describes.
Related ideas
For Raymond, Writing is one practical foundation of the Super Individual way of working: it helps turn expertise into an asset others can use and pay for. It also supports Second Brain and Time Management. In the AI era, his operational extension is the insistence that personal perspective and lived experience remain with the writer even when AI assists with editing, as discussed in Use Real-Life Experience to Counter AI Mediocrity
Sources
Footnotes
-
Raymond Hou, “After Six Months of Content Subscriptions, I Discovered the Essence of a Writing Habit: Creative Freedom,” WordPress article, June 17, 2021. Read the original, in Chinese. ↩
-
Raymond Hou, “Seven Techniques from Ten Years of Writing,” WordPress article, November 13, 2023. Read the original, in Chinese. ↩