It will not literally speak to you. But visible areas of increased connectivity within the slip box, what Sonke Ahrens calls "clusters" can guide you towards ideas ready for expression. - A System for Writing Pg 111
This is one of the big misconceptions with a Zettelkasten/PKM system, it will do the writing for you. You'll take a bunch of notes, and then one day you'll simply stack a bunch of notes together and have a book. In fact this is what I think Scott Scheper did with his Antinet Zettelkasten book which I think is terrible, and Bob agrees with me1. Scott just slapped a bunch of notes together and wrote through them, he even talks about it in his YouTube videos.
I was interested at first, then the more I watched his content the more I realized he was building to something. That something turned into a paid newsletter that he mailed to you. I'm sure he made money on it, but it felt gross to me and once I read his book it all felt like a lie.
Scott was selling "easy" writing, but writing isn't easy. Productivity guru's do this all the time, they tell you how effortless their system is and you should buy their course so you can have it as easy. Oh yeah, the Notion templates they sell will change your family life too. Kids will magically do their chores when they see the template.
And that birch tree in your backyard will start growing money instead of leaves.
Deep down you know that won't happen, but you read the next book hoping for a magic trick to make writing easy, because you're lazy. It's not just you, we're all lazy trying to do the minimum amount of work needed.
But Paul Silvia says it best in How to Write a Lot when he says that if you're not going to make a schedule to write, and think about your writing put down his book so it looks new and give it to a friend that really wants to be a better writing and is willing to do the work2.
If you want to learn it takes effort. Effort you need to put in, sometimes for years before you're going to see a return on investment. Yesterday I detailed the results of 16 years of writing and it's never been the money I've earned that's made it worthwhile.
Yes what stuck out to me this week was pretty much what stuck out to me last week, you have to put in the effort if you want to learn. If you're not willing to work your notes and spend time agonising over what they mean and how they connect, you're looking for the easy way out.
This simple advice is why I stopped coaching people on their notes. Every single person I coached could simply read the paragraph above and then do the damn work and never need to hire me for coaching. I'd have multiple meetings with someone and give them the same advice every time, schedule time to work your note connections and write about it. Spend time thinking about your writing and agonise over the words.
They rarely did it. I even had one person get mad at me because I didn't have an "trick" for them to use.
There are no tricks in learning. Read. Think. Read more. Think more. Write, rewrite, edit, toss it out, come back to the ideas. Suffer with bad writing, and maybe turn it into something good.
