When I will conclude my year of blogging I will dedicate this stolen time to more reading. I’ve learned that If I don’t actively take notes while reading I will retain a few commas. So I will write while reading. I might be able to publish much less daily but I should be able to capture more notes.
And, yes, then I will connect the captured note into a draft.
Shall I do “a year of draft writing”?
360/365.
How can we keep the curiosity active? Playing a musical instrument for the first time can be an exhilarating experience. Discovering the capability of producing the notes of those songs that we love is an unforgettable memory. The nature of those songs change ad well. It’s not anymore just a tune to hum indistinguishably but a precise sequence of dots and lines flying at set heights and with defined depth. It’s an entire new world of senses an sensations. You listen to music with new ears a new sensibility. It’s like being born again.
Something similar happens when you make an effort to write, draw, paint or build something.
Learning a new art or craft give us extra dimensions to our lives and makes us deeper, broader and richer.
Of we could go through the joy of learning while having fun there could be no limit to our happiness.
Can we brand a thinking process? Think about a toy brick, a 2-by-4 piece. It’s standard, created with high precision to respects specific dimensions, shapes and feature. Now think about what you can do with that piece. Within its constrained shape it offers infinite combinatorial possibilities with multiple instances of itself. Now take a set of instructions guiding you to use a given set of those bricks to be assembled into the model of a duck. We have building blocks and instructions like we could have ingredients and recipes.
Now imagine not having any user guide and playing with pieces until you find meaningful combinations. You might discover that three pieces form a leg so you can replicate the discovered pattern to add two or more legs tonyou fantasy creature. If you write done the sequence of steps needed to reproduce the little bear you just randomly assembled you would provide instructions to replicate your model.
But what happens if you collect the ways and the approaches you came up with to build the leg pattern in the first place? You would offer creative techniques to build more complex shaped out of atomic components.
And what if you discover how to 3d print your building blocks? Or designing and creating new formats of bricks?
This is what happens when we analyze the world around us and we transform data into information and then into knowledge. We identify atoms we can clearly distinguish, we recognize patterns of aggregated blocks and we learn how to do it through the process of learning and making.
I am dreaming about mental building blocks, thinking bricks and processes and techniques to discover new ways of thinking and novel and useful combinations of existing thoughts to innovate what we know and what we can discover.
How is this thing called? What is it? Who study that? What do we know about it? How can we work on it?
A wise learning goal is set when you have a clear mind about what you want to achieve. We all wear different hats, we live in different roles: person, citizen, community member, family member, worker, author, etc.
An effective learning goal is one set after having clarified your overall vision in your life and in your work. This might require time and effort and continuous revision but it would be the best way to identify a more meaningful learning path.
We should accept ambiguity and multiplicity in defining our identity and our roles. They are fluid and in continuous mutation. If we create a process to iteratively focus and refine them we could better understand what learning direction to take.
These are checklists to make my learning workflow tangible.
Summarizing an article means compressing information. If I am able to reduce an article to a summary, annotated and I can efficiently remember what’s in it, I should be able to read my summary and throw away the source. But besides filler words or elaborated ways of conveys meaning, when I am summarizing I am interpreting that content. So I need an intention. I should have clarified the reason why I am reading that source and what I want to do with the knowledge I can extract from it. So a summary can never be universal, each reader will do their own version of their summary and their notes. That’s also why the value of personal notes is limited unless you are annotating for specific public and you are curating the readability and the consistency of your notes.
I always thought I could read a text once and get its essence. While deep reading the current text I am at my third iteration of the first chapter and I keep on discovering new things. Some are substantial topics treated superficially which I had just skipped, some others are nuances and implications that emerge only if you really connect all pieces. It helped me writing notes with pen and paper, copying and redoing diagrams. By annotating the diagrams in my notes with the author’s explanation I find them richer and I can connect more of my experience. The more I read it the less I have new questions (I have already accumulated a bunch of them) and the more I can make internal connections. My greatest challenge is exactly this, going through the boredom of rereading a piece of text while looking for new insights. I am slow, this is taking me ages but I am satisfied with this new approach to learning.
While deep reading a book on creativity I am gathering useful questions. At the introduction I had already found some prompts to go deeper in the announced sections. Priming your brain before the actual experience opens up to ingest and digest information better. That approach is going in the opposite direction, now. I am collecting more questions than quotes and I feel very critical towards the author. It’s good, in principle, but my goal, in the end, should be the one of learning principles and concepts based on experience and rationality while finding new and useful connections. This seems like a first iteration in my reading process. It will be interesting to go over the accumulated notes and question during a second reading. It would be even better finding connections and commonalities or counterarguments when reading other books. Exciting.
The experience I made in a technical field came useful today when I had to explain to a peer how to face a certain context. I realized I had a clear vision about the problem, its ramifications and how to approach them.
I always feel like I need to study more and know more and I tend to undervalue the vast knowledge i have gathered on the field. Not having those notions written and organized doesn’t make them less valuable.
I only wish I could create objects out of my experience, to be more effective and flexible when sharing it.
Until we won’t find a way to implant knowledge, we need to start from scratch for every human being. While this opens to evolution and progress it has also an enormous cost and a great variation in the level achieved. Think about how each of us learns.
When we will be able to plug knowledge into a newborn we will experience a generational leap in our society. We could mitigate or eliminate bias and reduce ignorance.
But for now, we have to learn all that we need by starting from zero, and each time