SC 000 — Writing DAG

Summary

The earliest Sanity Check post. Writing is not one skill — it’s research, outline, draft, edit, edit, edit, and share. The common failure mode is cramming all steps into one sitting. Inspired by David Perell’s Write of Passage and his FAST writing style, the founder proposes treating writing as a DAG (directed acyclic graph) — a systematic workflow where dependencies matter and parallelization reduces cognitive burden.

Key Arguments

• Writing is multiple skills, not one — decompose it
• The single-sitting approach is a failure mode, not discipline
• DAG thinking from data engineering applies to creative work
• Write of Passage (David Perell) provided the initial framework

Writing Style Notes

Short, punchy, early-stage voice. The data-to-writing metaphor (DAG) is the seed of the founder’s entire approach — applying analytical frameworks to non-analytical domains. This is the DNA of Sanity Check.

Connections

• 01-projects/newsletter/index — the very first Sanity Check post
• 06-reference/2026-04-03-curiosity-consistency-newsletter-growth — writing systems as growth enabler
• 06-reference/2026-04-03-david-perell-writing-wisdom — Write of Passage as the inspiration
• 06-reference/2026-04-03-creativity-faucet-mental-model — the faucet model is the emotional complement to the DAG model
• 06-reference/concepts/systems-over-goals — treating writing as a system (DAG) rather than a goal (publish a post)