For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage. But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

The modern PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) movement traces its roots through para-academic obsessions with systems theory, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, and the Silicon Valley mythology of productivity as life. Roam Research turned bidirectional links into a cult. Obsidian let the cult go off-grid. The lore deepened. You weren’t taking notes. You were building a lattice of meaning. A library Borges might envy.

n “The Library of Babel,” he imagines an infinite library containing every possible book. Among its volumes are both perfect truth and perfect gibberish. The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. The map swallows the territory.

The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder.

Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders.

Merlin Donald, in his theory of cognitive evolution, argues that human intelligence emerged not from static memory storage but from external symbolic representation: tools like language, gesture, and writing that allowed us to rehearse, share, and restructure thought. Culture became a collective memory system - not to archive knowledge, but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked. In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure.

When I am in good hands I open myself to a state of curiosity and appreciation. I allow myself to suspend preconceived notions. I give you freedom to take me where you want to go. I immerse myself in your worldview and pause judgement.

That trust doesn’t come easily. As an audience member it’s about feeling cared for from the moment I interact with your work. It’s about feeling a well-defined point of view permeate what you make. If my mind was changed, I must have been in good hands.

I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail. I can feel it almost instantly. In any medium. Music, film, fashion, architecture, writing, software. At a Japanese restaurant it’s what omakase aims to be. I leave it up to you, chef.

We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren’t familiar with. In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges. I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.

I consider myself as an internet offspring. I had the chance to access to computers very early in my life and I think it had a big influence on who I am right now. Like a lot of us, internet citizens, what I value the most is learning. Whatever the subject, whatever it takes, whatever it cost, money or time, what I like most is learning. That's, I think, the biggest reason of why I'm starting this "Limitless Exploration" project.

It's not just having to commit your ideas to specific words that makes writing so exacting. The real test is reading what you've written. You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing of what's in your head, only what you wrote.

You can know a great deal about something without writing about it. Can you ever know so much that you wouldn't learn more from trying to explain what you know? I don't think so.

Meaningful additions to the world rest on novel connections among pre-existing concepts, objects and situations, not self-indulgent originality for its own sake. What we glorify as flashes of brilliance are usually astute observations about the world, improved by critical thinking and critique. And observations often begin from a question.

because many of us have been rewarded and praised for having right answers and clever ideas, in school as well as in professional life, the questioning and critiquing part of design can get very uncomfortable.

A quick and effective fix is to stop brainstorming ideas with your team, and start brainstorming questions instead. Getting together and listing every question you can think of about a problem, a process, or a situation is uncomfortable at first, and then in very short order enhances collaboration, decreases risk and puts you on the path to being a learning organization.

The same applies to writing. For example, when one topic doesn’t seem to fit a narrative structure, it often feels like a problem I need to “get out of the way”. It’s much better to wonder: “Hm, why do I have this strong instinct that this point’s related? Is there some more powerful unifying theme waiting to be identified here?”

Often I need to improve the framing, to find one which better expresses what I’m deeply excited about. If I can’t find a problem statement which captures my curiosity, it’s best to drop the project for now.

I’m much less likely to flinch away when I’m feeling intensely curious, when I truly want to understand something, when it’s a landscape to explore rather than a destination to reach. Happily, curiosity can be cultivated. And curiosity is much more likely than task-orientation to lead me to interesting ideas.

Savor the subtle insights which really do occur regularly in research. Think of it like cultivating a much more sensitive palate.

“Why is this so hard? Because you’re utterly habituated to steady progress—to completing things, to producing, to solving. When progress is subtle or slow, when there’s no clear way to proceed, you flinch away. You redirect your attention to something safer, to something you can do. You jump to implementation prematurely; you feel a compulsion to do more background reading; you obsess over tractable but peripheral details. These are all displacement behaviors, ways of not sitting with the problem. Though each instance seems insignificant, the cumulative effect is that your stare rarely rests on the fog long enough to penetrate it. Weeks pass, with apparent motion, yet you’re just spinning in place. You return to the surface with each glance away. You must learn to remain in the depths.”

Depth of concentration is cumulative, and precious. An extra hour or two of depth is enormously valuable. I reliably get more done—and with more depth—in that 6-7 hour morning block than I’d previously done in 9-10 hours throughout the day.This feels wonderful. By 2PM, I’ve done my important work for the day. I know that no more depth-y work is likely, and that I’ll only frustrate myself if I try—so I free myself from that pressureI notice that some part of me feels ashamed to say that I’m “done” working at 2PM. This is probably because in my previous roles, I really could solve problems and get more done by simply throwing more hours at the work. That’s just obviously not true in my present work, as I’ve learned through much frustration. Reading memoirs of writers, artists, and scientists, I see that 2-4 hours per day seems to be the norm for a primary creative working block. Separately, and I don’t want to harp on this because I want this essay to be about quality, not quantity, but: I think most people are laughably misled about how much time they truly work. In a median morning block, I complete the equivalent of 1225-minute pomodoros. When I worked at large companies, getting 8 done before 6PM was a rarity—even though I’d assiduously arrange my calendar to maximize deep work!. I take meetings; I exercise; I meditate; I go on long walks. I’ll often do shallower initial reads of papers and books in the afternoon, or handle administrative tasks. Sometimes I’ll do easy programming work. It’s all “bonus time”, nothing obligatory. My life got several hours more slack when I adopted this schedule, and yet my output improved. Wonderful!

no internet on my phone before I sit down at my desk. I don’t want anyone else’s thoughts in my head before I start thinking my own.

If I spend a working interval flailing, never sinking below the surface, the temptation is to double-down, to “make up for it”. But the right move for me is usually to go sit in a different room with only my notebook, and to spend the next working interval writing or sketching by hand about the problem.

Administrative tasks are a constant temptation for me: aha, a task I can complete! How tantalizing! But these tasks are rarely important. So I explicitly prohibit myself from doing any kind of administrative work for most of the morning. In the last hour or two, if I notice myself getting weary and unfocused, I’ll sometimes switch gears into administrative work as a way to “rescue” that time.

I’ve noticed that unhealthy afternoon/evening activities can easily harm the next morning’s focus, by habituating me to immediate gratification.

most of the benefit just seems to come from regularly reflecting on what I’m trying and what’s happening as a result. It’s really about developing a rich mental model of what focus and perseverance feel like, and what factors seem to support or harm those states of mind.

Sometimes I just need to execute; and then traditional productivity advice helps enormously. But deep insight is generally the bottleneck to my work, and producing it usually involves the sort of practices I’ve described here.