perhaps this helps to explain why the concept of Zettelkasten never quite took hold for me, while Linking Your Thinking is perhaps the framework i’ve circled around the most in my own implementation of “something that helps me make sense.”
it’s definitely one that i’ve bastardized quite a lot, though…
while searching around i also found nick milo’s video What is a Note? and he talks about the collector’s fallacy.1 and, at over 11k notes now, i’m compelled a little to think about why i have so many, and how useful all of these are. is it especially important to me that i get my album count over 5,000? what am i trying to prove?
yet i also know that i take a foraging-forward approach to my media consumption. listening to me is an act of digging – discovering both what i like and what i don’t like – and if anything the notes that lay fallow here are warning markers that these are directions that i’ve already traveled and would rather not travel further. and for every 100, uh, Steven Halpern – Study & Learning (1985)s i listen to2 there ends up being a Sonic Coaster Pop that utterly rewires my brain and gives me a direction to pursue.
so balancing foraging and reflection is tough, right? should i let my passion dictate what gets ascribed value? and if so, does cultivating this passion become of primary concern?3
Footnotes
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oops i looked into this and the collector’s fallacy is more about believing that collecting items of knowledge is an effective substitute for reading and digesting them yourself. which i guess i never believed anyway: if it was really that easy then the hardest part of college would’ve been buying the textbooks – after that, i’m home free. ↩
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actually wait i picked that one at random but it does have a line that i still think about every so often, so i guess it has value too, even if i don’t remember a single second of the music now. ↩
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i’m also aware that my notebook’s rationale naturally veers by default away from the cerebral focus that a lot of these sorts of notebooks have. so the act of applying these frameworks has always been difficult because the source material isn’t nonfiction books, articles, blog posts. ↩