Not because of the subject matter or anything. With one exception, I can't remember what any of them were about.
The one I remember is an 11th-grade English assignment. My teacher had us write an essay on this prompt: "Analyze how and why The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American Dream as it exists in a corrupt period."
The day after I handed in my essay, Mrs. Kars printed it out and we spent the entire period reviewing it with the class.
It was the first time anything I had ever written had been recognized. Now that I think about it, it may have been one of the first times in my life that I had ever felt like I might be anything but average.
I would later ask Mrs. Kars for a letter of recommendation to a college I did not get accepted to, but I can still remember a line from it. "I have no doubt," she said, "that Ryan will someday be a literary giant."
I don't know about that. But I can say that that essay — which upon re-reading is not that good — and the many others I had to write did what essays have done for generations of young people: they taught me how to use my brain. In having to write them, I learned how to think, I learned to think hard about something and then most importantly how to articulate what I thought about it.
This is slow, tedious, difficult work. It takes discipline and patience. The hours and hours of sitting with frustration and confusion. It takes trial and error.
In Wisdom Takes Work, I tell a story about Eisenhower when he was a promising young general. Just days after Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was called in to see George Marshall, the chief of staff of the US Army. Japan was going to seize the Philippines and dozens of other islands in the Pacific, Marshall explained. America faced a war in two theaters with supply lines stretching thousands of miles. "What should be our general line of action?" Marshall asked Eisenhower.
A certain type of officer would have started thinking out loud, riffed, brainstormed. Not Eisenhower. His career and potentially millions of lives hung in the balance.
"Give me a few hours," he said. At a spare desk in the War Plans Division, Eisenhower requisitioned paper, a pen, and a typewriter and got to work. What did Marshall want to accomplish? What was possible? What was of the highest priority? What risks were acceptable?
After a period of reflection, he wrote his thoughts out. What Marshall needed was "short, emphatic…reasoning," not "oratory, plausible argument, or glittering generality." The writing exercise helped him synthesize ideas from conversations he'd had with his mentor General Fox Conner, from books he'd read, from courses at the Army War College, and from his three decades in uniform. As dusk fell, Eisenhower handed Marshall a three-hundred-word briefing on yellow lined paper titled "Assistance to the Far East/Steps to Be Taken."
Almost certainly Marshall had already considered most of what Eisenhower had written. The assignment was, in a way, a test. What kind of a thinker was this young officer? How did he approach problems? How good was he at responding under pressure? Could he see the big picture? Could he effectively communicate what he knew and what he wanted to do?
"I agree with you," Marshall eventually replied about Eisenhower's plan, and then told him to execute it. Thus began one of the most effective partnerships of the war, propelling Eisenhower to the presidency.
Successful campaigns and careers — whether they involve leading people into battle or saving their souls or selling them things — depend on this kind of thinking process.
This is what worries me about what AI is doing to writing — and the school essay especially.
As I write this line, not only does software make suggestions on spelling and help me eliminate errors, it suggests how I might finish sentences or word them better. If I want, I could simply click over to other software and ask it to write the draft for me. But these fast, easy ways to produce what resembles a finished piece of writing would defeat the purpose. Which is to engage and struggle with the material for an extended period of time. To take my time. To go over things again and again. To be immersed. To be focused, patient, and disciplined. To come to understand things deeply.
A couple of years ago, I asked Robert Greene what he thought about AI. "I think back to when I was 19-years-old and in college," Robert said. It was a class where they were to read and translate classical Greek texts "They gave us a passage of Thucydides, the hardest writer of all to read in ancient Greek," he explained. "I had this one paragraph I must have spent ten hours trying to translate…That had an incredible impact on me. It developed character, patience, and discipline that helps me even to this day. What if I had ChatGPT, and I put the passage in there, and it gave me the translation right away? The whole thinking process would have been annihilated right there."
For an entire generation of young people, the whole thinking process is being annihilated. How will they figure out what they think? How will they develop critical thinking skills? How will they develop focus, patience, discipline? How will they come to understand things deeply?
We think as we write. Indeed, we cannot finish a sentence until we have carried the thought all the way through. We ponder opposing ideas as we pause between keystrokes, the pen becomes our third eye. On the page we see the pattern. Transcribing the passage or a quote, we get to feel real genius and insight pass through our mind and our fingers, processing each word, weighing and understanding the wisdom. We see what we didn't see before. And when we take edits and feedback from others, we see even more, because editing is a kind of interrogation, a process by which we are refining and sharpening our thinking, a way to get our story straight.
Joan Didion described writing as a "hostile act." By that she meant that the writer is trying "to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture." But Keynes was even closer to the mark when he referred to writing as the "assault of thought on the unthinking." A battle against our own wild thoughts, against the preconceived assumptions of others, against all the alternative ideas (and tempting facts) out there.
The purpose of the school essay — of any piece of writing at all — is not the end product on the page. It's the person YOU are on the other side of having done it. It's the thinking long and hard about something. It's the slow, tedious, difficult work of figuring out what you actually work. And the equally hard work of finding the words for what you think.
AI can you give you an essay, an article, a book, or a briefing.
What it can't give you is the person you can only become by doing the writing yourself.