Four Reasons Why You Should Write Online

The beauty of positive feedback loops

4 min readDec 23, 2022

It is almost the end of 2022. In this post, I want to reflect on how writing creates positive feedback loops.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post called “Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems: What Causes Them and 3 Things You can do to Tame Them”. It is a summary of my takeaways from a paper with an analogy from the physical world.

As I went through this process, I realized that the act of writing about this helped me learn a few new things. Here’s my “behind the scenes” look at that process.

The search for a “physical world analogy” led to reading and learning more

To bring out the intuition behind metastable failures, I wanted to explain it using such a failure in the physical world. So, I started looking at various candidates:

What about the human digestive system when it gets overloaded, say after an “all-you-can-eat” buffet?
What about an overloaded coffee shop?
What about the overload at a theme park ride? Is that a metastable failure?

Now, to answer these questions, I needed to understand better the crux of metastable failures: the positive feedback loop. This helped me evaluate the above failures using that framework.

This led me to learning more about positive and negative feedback loops: leading to learning about how widely applicable it is across so many domains:

Homeostasis ³ (negative feedback loop to control of body temperature),
Blood clotting (positive feedback loop)
How droughts are formed (positive feedback loop)
Bank runs (positive feedback loop)
Animal stampedes (positive feedback loop)

I then started reading about the “Flywheel effect” ¹ and its relationship to positive feedback loop, stumbling upon books and material from Jim Collins. I also came across the “Thinking in Systems” ² book by Donella H Meadows which goes into a lot of detail about such feedback loops. I have read the first two chapters in it, need to finish reading it during early 2023 and internalize the learnings better. I also came across this excellent talk (Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind ⁴) by Bryan Cantrill.

I would probably have not read or watched any of the above if I was not trying to write about this. As a bonus, all these learnings / things I ended up reading can be material to use for future writings.

So, ironically, as I was looking to write about positive feedback loop examples, I realized there are many good positive feedback loops that the act of writing itself brings…

The Beauty of Writing: Its Positive Feedback Loops

To write better, I had to read and learn more, which should help me to write more. So, you get loops such as:

Positive Feedback Loop #1: The more you write the more you read, and the more you read the more you write.

Positive Feedback Loop #2: The more you write the more clarity you get, and the more clarity you get the more you write.

On a gut feel, I selected the “Angels Landing Hike” as my analogy for the metastable failure. However, initially I didn’t have full clarity on the exact positive feedback loop involved in that metastable failure. After a couple of attempts of writing about it and some relaxed mode reflection (and discussing it with my kids :)), the exact positive feedback loop (for that situation) jumped out on me.

Positive Feedback Loop #3: The more you write the more you provide value to others, and the more you provide value to others the more you write.

The more the readers find value in your writing, it will energize you to write more.

Positive Feedback Loop #4: The more you write -> the more you get feedback from others -> the more you write.

The feedback / questions you get from your readers can spark more ideas. That can lead to you writing more. Here’s an example of where I posted an atomic essay (~300 words) that led to a reader asking me a follow-up question that led to more reflection leading to writing a follow-up atomic essay.

So, write and hit that publish button often and consistently (without worrying too much about how it will be perceived)! It can take you to various new places.