What Great Founders Have in Common

You’re reading an excerpt of Great Founders Write, by Ben Putano, writer, entrepreneur, and book publisher. He’s the founder of Damn Gravity Media, a publishing house that inspires and educates tomorrow’s great founders. Purchase now for lifetime access to the book and on-demand video course.

Many of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs are also prolific writers.

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey has kept a journal since she was fifteen years old. “It’s a wonder that I’ve managed to be a successful human being considering how pathetic I appeared in many of my daily musings,” she said in a blog post on her website. “It’s a testament to growth and grace that I’ve come this far.”

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has built his entire organization on the back of meticulous writing habits. From shareholder letters to product meetings, writing plays an essential role in running the global behemoth (we’ll revisit Amazon’s writing tactics many times throughout this book).

Tim Ferriss—an entrepreneur, author, and podcast host—credits writing with transforming his life when he was a student at Princeton.

Despite being a neuroscience major, Ferriss took a non-fiction writing course taught by the legendary journalist John McPhee. It was in this class that Ferriss developed the minimalist mindset he’s famous for today. Ferriss recalls getting papers back from McPhee where there was more red ink than black. Whole passages were crossed out. “You don’t need this,” McPhee wrote in the margins.

McPhee didn’t just teach Ferris how to write; he taught him how to think. “Once I started taking this writing course, my grades in all of my other classes went up,” Ferriss said on his podcast.

And the power of writing extends far beyond business. The world’s first two-time Nobel Prize winner, Marie Curie, kept a diary throughout her career, particularly after the death of her husband, who was also her lab partner. She wrote to her late husband as a means to summon the courage to continue their historic work. “I am working in the laboratory all day long, it is all I can do: I am better off there than anywhere else,” she wrote.

(A few years later, Curie published a 971-page, Nobel-winning treatise on radioactivity. Talk about prolific.)

The link between writing and personal achievement is undeniable and widely recorded. Just search “benefits of writing” in Google Scholar, and you’ll find over 4.1 million results. A paper by Dr. Cecil Smith of Northern Illinois University sums it up best:

Writing enables the external storage of information that can be represented symbolically (e.g., letters, numbers, words, formulas, drawings) and which can then be analyzed, critiqued, reproduced, and transformed, among other potential actions …

Writing might be beneficial to cognitive skills because it requires focusing of attention, planning and forethought, organization of one’s thinking, and reflective thought, among other abilities—thereby sharpening these skills through practice and reinforcement …

Writing is a significant literacy activity in modern life that enables individuals to accomplish a variety of personal, intellectual, occupational, and recreational goals.

Writing has always been an important skill for entrepreneurs, but it has never been this important.

That’s why I wrote this book.