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Book: So Good They Can't Ignore You

The four overarching rules

  1. Ignore passion
  2. Build career capital
  3. Turn capital into control over your working conditions, not into promotions
  4. Have a mission (similar to passion, but different)

Concepts in detail

  • Career capital
    • Basically "good CV". Skill, familiarity with company's systems, how much do competitors want to hire you
  • First control trap
    • If your employer is willing to give you control (or is likely to replace you for your annoying demands), it's a sign it's too soon; build more career capital
  • Second control trap
    • If your employer will resist your bid for control, it's time to gather your courage and do it, since this indicates your value and you can negotiate for great things
  • Law of financial viability
    • Do what others are willing to pay for
  • Mission
    • Ignore it until you have some career capital
    • You don't know what specifically you will end up doing to further your mission, don't commit to one way
    • Make many small bets

Case studies

What links here

Created (3 years ago)

Mandatory titles clash with Luhmann

#slipbox

An issue with org-roam and many other digital slipboxes: titles are mandatory.

Maybe this suits Jethro and the other developers, and it suited me when I first started. Coming from a world where all files we ever create must be given a title, it wouldn't have occurred to me as something I'd want to live without. Besides, the title was how I used to find those files in the first place. But I found advice by a zettelkasten blogger (maybe it was Alex Keyhayias or Andy Matuschak) to try the original pen-and-paper Luhmann system for at least a while.

With the Luhmann system, most notes lack titles.

Freedom from titles means:

  • You avoid the mental work of titling things
  • Notes really do stand and fall with their connections

I used to worry about whether to title notes as nouns or as active statements. Matuschak even has ideas about titles as a kind of API…

But suppose that all new notes just got a random number as title unless you deign to re-title it later. And suppose we modify all our commands such as org-roam-node-insert to use ripgrep for matches in body texts instead of a title search. In a way, we'd treat the bodies as titles to themselves (kind of Logseq-ish!). Any titles matter less since we'd not depend on them to find the right note.

That boils down to a couple of lessons we can learn right now, if we still use mandatory titles:

  1. Don't sweat the titles – write the first title that comes to mind, and think of them as near-random slugs that only maybe incidentally say something about the content
  2. Rely first of all on the presence of interlinks to find any note – so refer to topic notes when you're looking for a note you remember. Rely second on ripgrep or filesystem order (both date created and date modified have analogues in the pen-and-paper system), and last (or never) on org-roam-node-find.

What links here

Created (3 years ago)

How to reduce creepy-crawlies on your farm?

Undesirables:

  • Mosquitoes
  • Flies
  • Slugs
  • Ticks

Hunters:

  • Bats
  • Dragonflies
  • Toads & other reptiles
  • Small birds

Arrange a pond for reptiles and dragonflies, but be mindful that ponds also breed mosquitoes, so build it in a way that favours dragonflies and eliminate other still water bodies in the area, such as open rainwater collectors.

Build bird houses and especially bat houses (endangered), but be mindful that they can prey on your dragonflies.

Selecting a plot of land

  • If your plot of land includes a stream, that should attract many predators. Use it to build a pond too.
  • To reduce flies, find land far from cattle farms.
  • To reduce mosquitoes and bugs in general, find high ground far from lakes.
  • If you own the forest next to it, improve its biodiversity.
    • undo the monoculture and randomly sow a diverse set of plants and fungi
    • make lots of houses for bats, birds, hedgehogs, squirrel, …
    • erect cairns (piles of stone)
    • make open sandy areas
    • set up a beehive that you leave alone
Created (3 years ago)

Book: How to Take Smart Notes

Book by Sönke Ahrens (around 2017) about how to use Niklas Luhmann's slipbox method ("zettelkasten" in German).

Reading this book, I generated these pages:

When learning anything, do everything as if nothing counts other than writing

Imagine a strange alternate universe in which the only way humans could hold on to any abstract information was by writing it out first. How would you approach learning abstract topics? Now what if I told you: that universe is this one!

Slipbox doesn't mean archiving info outside your head

First, the writing process itself alters your brain. Writing is learning. In a way, writing onto paper has the effect of writing it into your grey matter. So the act really creates two copies of the info – you imagine you'll be highly dependent on your notes, but sans having written the notes, the info wouldn't even be in your own head, only the vaguest recollections.

Second, the slipbox helps you discover how an idea fits in with other ideas – hard without access to old notes. You can't remember every idea you've had all the time.

Third, the work involved in "slotting" info into your slipbox is not a wasted overhead. Sans slipbox, you'd have done the same cognitive work in some form or other, once you really needed to do something with an idea (but it'd also have required more upfront work due to the lack of old notes to converse with).

Reading is amusement, writing is learning

  1. Even if we could remember everything we read, it's not clear it's best to just read as much as possible. We want to think about what we take in, and we want to ensure we remember the right things at the right times.
  2. We can't in fact remember everything we read.

Both issues can be taken care of through notes: not excerpts, but condensed reformulated accounts of a text.

Why ever just read? The whole use out of reading is to gather writing ideas! Taking notes is never a detour.

Getting the gist

By "reading with pen in hand" to write slipbox notes, you engage in deliberate practice at getting the gist of an idea.

Doubly so if not using a laptop, but literal pen and paper.

Niklas Luhmann's notes are very condensed. With practice comes the ability to express something in the best possible way. This benefits readers of your texts, and spills over into conversation and even thinking.

Slipbox develops real expertise

Gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops on success or failure.

Experts have enough experience that they can intuit answers. This is how intuition is built in the first place. Rheinberger 1997 apparently studied (or refers to studies on) natural scientists in their labs and concludes that science does not function without expertise, intuition and experience.

Chess masters seem to think less than beginners: they make it seem effortless because it is. Veteran paramedics even look like they "do it wrong".

When the time comes to push the shovel, it's best to have done all your thinking already, during past studies. College students don't do this much, I believe it's common to mainly start thinking about the facts you learned, when the time came to rely on them at the workplace. It's even expected at most workplaces that you'll need a novice period. This study method doesn't work well for everyone, leading to low grades for people who could still be very intelligent, who may be better served by an alternative way to study, such as the slipbox.

The slipbox builds gut feeling, and therefore real expertise.

What links here

Created (3 years ago)
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