Writing essays about your thoughts and opinions is a very good idea. Here’s why (roughly in order of importance)...
It helps you to develop your thoughts. You’ll find holes in your thinking, and reach more rational conclusions. You’ll explore your thoughts in more depth, which often leads to new thoughts and ideas, as well as to a deeper understanding of things. It’s somewhat hard to believe that simply writing down what you’re already thinking will do anything for you. The reason it does is because when you try to write down what you’re thinking, you’re likely to realize that there are problems with what you were thinking, and you’ll be forced to rethink things in a more sensical way. Really though, it’s hard to explain why the act of writing out your thoughts helps you develop them. The best way to understand this is to take an hour and try it.
In addition to refining and expanding your current thoughts (first bullet point), writing allows you to get better at expressing them clearly and concisely. Thinking things through in your head isn’t enough. And arguing about them with your friends isn’t enough. Trust me. Once you try to write them down, you’ll get better at expressing them clearly. And I don’t have to tell you why the ability to express your thoughts clearly is important.
You’ll learn more about yourself and about what you’re interested and passionate about.
**Making your writings public might have the benefit of pressuring you into doing your best work. It might also have the following benefits. Note that these benefits probably have a lot of overlap.**
It could show people, like potential employers, that you’re smart (outbound opportunities). Hiring is difficult. You’re dealing with very limited information about the candidates. If you look up a candidate and see that he has insightful and impressive writings, you’ll be intrigued. People might also read your writings and come to you to present you with opportunities (inbound opportunities). See breaking into silicon valley with a blog for more information.
It increases your luck surface area. Your luck surface area is: doing something you’re passionate about X telling people about it. The product of those two things is the amount of luck you can expect to get. See luck surace area for more information.
You might receive good feedback, which you could learn from and improve your ideas.
You might meet like-minded people and develop friendships.
If you don’t write, you’re limiting yourself greatly. Your thoughts, ideas and opinions won’t be as good. You won’t be as good at expressing them clearly. And you won’t expose yourself to life changing opportunities. You should care about having good thoughts. You should care about expressing yourself clearly. You should care about life changing opportunities. You should write!! Oh, and one more reason to write... it’s fun!