This is probably more of a personal realization, but I will just fatuosly generalize it: You cannot know what you think until you write it.
I think the mind and his inner discourse isn't reigned by reasoning. It's the chicken or the egg dilemma: It's impossible to know if your thoughts shape your emotions or your emotions change the way you think. Or more simply: It's imposible to know with whom your brain agrees first. A brain can agree with both emotions or abstractions, the reason why your brain thinks it found "truth" it's because it encounters himself with either one or the other first, but with honesty, I think the brain tends to favor emotions; We're mostly emotional beings.
There's something that happens when you write your thoughts down: Your brain it's not making the connection between your ideas anymore, the piece of paper does. Only then, you start seeing what your brain was really "doing" and what dots was connecting. Again, this is pretty personal, but has happenned to me a lot of times that I thought I had a great idea, then went to a piece of paper only to know how stupid that idea really was.
I think people should write as much as they think, they're both really interdependent. It's obvious that, If you don't think first, there's nothing for you to write. On the other side: If you don't write what you think, there's no 'thinking' (or 'honest' thinking, I should say); For you don't know what the bias of you thinking really is. I wonder how many people vote without writing the reasons why they're voting for, I wonder how many people have children without ever writing why they're having children in the first place, I wonder how many times I have made a mistake because I didn't write it down.
But there's yet another thing: Reading. It's not only about writing and thinking, reading it's also as important. If we don't read what the greatest minds thought, we are thinking miles behind what has been thought. I wonder what the right ratio for those three things is, but it really doesn't matter: Most people (sadly) don't have the time (thanks capitalism). Whatever the ratio might be, thinking needs leisure, I'm pretty sure you cannot decide "when to think", the same way you cannot choose when to fall in love; It just happens. Let alone the time you need for reading and writing; both really lenghty 'hobbies' if you want to do them well
The next time I have an idea, I'll think it twice.
