Why is writing a 'Must-have' skill in the Era of ChatGPT?

When you can spend a few cents to write an entire 1000 words Essay in a few seconds.

Yes. No.

What do you think?

While Chat GPT has made it easy to crank out new blogs, it is still hard to write good essays.

As Charles Bukowski once said in his poem:

Libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind.

When you start thinking about writing, you realize how rare good writing is.

Also, Let's understand there are different types of writing.

Writing for others, such as Copywriting, writing news articles, and writing to sell, will be automated, and ChatGPT can and will take away those jobs.

But...

Writing for yourself

Writing to think, writing to express your emotions, and writing to express your thoughts, can't be taken away by ChatGPT.

Writing to heal and to uncover yourself and what you know can't be taken away either.

You don't just write to communicate your ideas. You write to change readers' minds and their understanding of the world.

However, before changing the reader's mind, you must make up your mind.

And to make up your mind, you need to understand why you made up your mind that way by challenging your ways, critiquing your thoughts through writing, and, at every sentence deciding on what's worth keeping and what's not. Only when you rediscover why you think the way you do. You gather the courage to share your ideas with your community on what you uncovered in the process. Only then do you write to change readers' minds?

Hence, writing is not only for changing people's minds but also for changing your own.

The reason you're writing everything down, starting from your research to what you read and learn:

1. Is to be able to find something which you won't be able to find otherwise.
2. Is to be able to refer to and quote accurately.
3. Is to be able to go back, question, and understand who you read, why you took that as the truth, and why it can be changed based on your latest understanding of the topic.
4. You build a second brain because you want to refer to all your previous thinking. It's like sending notes through time.
5. If you take notes, you can always see how you used to think.

Chat GPT can't take that away.

Writing to add value

Suppose you're adding value through your discoveries and epiphanies. In that case, you might be slow through writing, as speaking is faster than writing. However, you can use a template if you plan to add value by summarising books. Search for a template to summarise the books for your community to get the maximum value out of them.

Wait,
if ChatGPT can summarise articles for you
then
why would someone read your summary?

I am glad you asked.

See, you need to understand this.

You're summarising the book based on what you knew and what you learned; someone else may get something else out of it. Even rereading something might uncover new insights you have not previously paid attention to.

Summarizing is first for yourself so that you remember what you learned when you read it for the first time.

Second, sharing your summary with others will help people who decide if it's worth their time who are yet to read it; it will also add value if they happen to learn something new.

Summarizing is like squeezing lemons. Every time you squeeze, you get a bit more lemon juice.

It doesn't mean that lemon Juice wasn't there, to begin with. It was. However, getting everything out of it in the first go wasn't possible, and that's okay.

People would read your summary because they are more than just reading the author's summary. They read your articulation of the author's words through your worldview, your understanding, and experiences which adds your flavor to the original writing, which wasn't there, to begin with.

People would read your summary because they want to read, hear, and learn from you.

Conclusion

Writing for others can be taken away by Chat GPT.

While ChatGPT can help write and rewrite memos and things, you don't need to worry about the quality. However, You can't have an AI journal your day. Journal your emotions, journal your reflection. Writing to think, writing to express, writing to uncover, and writing to heal is something no human or AI can take away from you.

Only you can take that ability away from yourself.