Slow Down, Tend the System, Engage Passion

Speed over Depth

Searching for something to write about today I came across my notes on Normal Sucks which highlighted that school values how fast you can retrieve information over the depth of understanding of that information¹. Revisionist History covered the same idea when it looked at the LSAT exam valuing speed over deep thinking in the field of law.

Relating to today, this seems to be what the promise of AI tooling brings to the table. You'll be able to get more done faster which also ties into the ideas from this month's book club book that we never subtract we always add things to our plate. This doing more stuff doesn't mean we do the same amount faster and then call it a day. Instead we do more. We increase our workload so that we're constantly in overload mode.

Worse, we may not even understand what the tooling is doing for us. We ask for an explanation, but that barely scratches the surface of our tasks. Sure, the former hard-won struggle took days, maybe weeks to win our knowledge, but then we truly understood what we were doing.

Eric Barker echoes this idea in Barking up the Wrong Tree as he talks about the struggle needed for meaning². He contends without struggle there is no meaning in our effort that we don't leave a mark and don't feel like we accomplished something. We don't own the struggle so we don't own the outcome and feel triumph.

Nothing is Maintenance Free

The myth that many note takers cling to is that the perfect system is out there, one that requires no maintenance. It doesn't exist; every system accumulates cruft and needs to be reorganized. Notes get buried and you forget about them. If you want to surface good ideas from your notes you need a method to force yourself to look back through them.

I use Random Notes for this, but I'm sure there are other methods. The thing is, they all take time, time where you're not adding new ideas, but looking through older ideas and then connecting them to newer ideas. Time where you may look at 100 different ideas and have nothing to write.

It's easy for this work to feel like a waste of time, but it's crucial work if you want to make the most of any note system.

For instance, this idea was found spelunking and finding my notes on Strong Towns.

A man is what he is most passionate about

“A man is what he has passion about,” Breeze said. “I’ve found that if you give up what you want most for what you think you should want more, you’ll just end up miserable.” - Mistborn