Expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong
Paul Graham – Writing, Briefly
The sentence above sums up why I think it’s useful to try and capture how you think about big and important areas of your life.
It forces you to properly structure your ideas. It forces you to scrutinise every idea. And it forces you to explain things in simple terms. I always end up with stronger ideas, and more clarity afterwards.
The constraint of fitting it into one page (let’s say 250-300 words), helps to keep things clean, elegant and concise. It encourages you to re-write and edit until it fits.
Almost every idea can fit onto one page. If Elon can capture Tesla’s original strategy in a tweet – trust me, you can definitely fit big ideas into one page.
Here are my one pagers. Feel free to sign up here to get the heads up when a new one is added.