Substrate

Understanding requires effortful engagement; you are not likely to draw much understanding from a folder of barely-skimmed PDFs.

In startups, roles are fluid. Everyone wears many hats: what’s important isn’t one’s job description but the problems which need to be solved. ​ If you’re going to have a team with continuously negotiated roles, you need a context for that continuous negotiation. These demos unified the “tests” with the real work. Eventually, I came to understand that they put themselves into these terrible situations as a way to force themselves to innovate, that the desperation was productive, not destructive. It was desperation, but by design. ​ We worked from deep desperation, but as Vaughn describes, it was absolutely one of the most exhilarating and dynamic periods of my life. But these big-picture problem statements shatter fractally into a hundred sub-problems, and most of the progress in my work comes from identifying and improving articulations these sub-problems.

I am not convinced as Andy suggests that reading retention and note-taking are fundamental skills of knowledge work. What's more I have a suspicion that many knowledge workers over-rely on the act of collecting notes. Too much note taking is pernicious: it feels like doing something, while also giving you an excuse to endlessly delay putting forth your own thoughts until you have all the pieces. Rather than collecting and storing thoughts, the deliberate practice of knowledge, the expression of creativity that comes from play, necessitates sharing nascent and feeble ideas.

They have insight; they have intuition. These come from an internalized philosophy about the field, drawn from experience, observation, and stories.

I need a strategy that bends, not breaks, while still holding me accountable over time. It should supply pressure smoothly and flexibly. So now I start each habit with a low weekly goal: e.g. meditate once per week, any day. That bar is low enough that I don’t have to schedule it or do anything special. Once that stabilizes, I ratchet up the target frequency.

Designing media to reflect how people think and learn

In math, we might show a student a peer’s strategy, then ask them to solve a new variant of the problem. In the humanities, we might show a student a peer’s essay beside their own, then ask them to draw lines between all the places they and their peer were making the same argument.

In the middle of my sketching hours, I don’t want to be worrying about whether I’ll be ready for my classroom prototype next month. Within a given day, action-oriented “butt-in-chair”-style advice does help; meta-thought is just distracting. But go too long without error correction, and you’ll misspend hours in the chair. ​ The rest of the day’s work becomes roughly deontological. I give myself permission to be satisfied with the day if I spent three focused hours sketching like I’d planned. ​ From time to time, I flip back into execution mode. It feels like an old friend. We say hello, dance for a while, and part ways smiling, just as it always was. Open-ended mode is more enigmatic, reserved—yet occasionally it sparks some moment so singular it lights up the whole year. Those moments don’t happen without the days spent together between those moments. I’m slowly learning to make the most of our quiet strolls.

Others’ trails could be applied to materials you already have, so you could see a colleague’s associative structures alongside your own, on the same files. Yes, on a wiki, you can add a link to the text yourself…but that link would appear for _everyone._ There’s no notion of _personal_ associative markup.