Showing 377 to 380

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 (2 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 (2 years ago)
Showing 377 to 380