Thread by @fortelabs

1/ This excerpt from sociologist C. Wright Mills’ “Appendix: On Intellectual Craftsmanship” is so great & chillingly close to what we teach in BASB (found via Manfred Kuehn at connectedtext.com/manfred.php)

Use your life to enrich your work & vice-versa

2/ You must keep a file or journal to capture your experiences and use them to guide and inform your work

3/ This file should mix personal and professional projects, and will help you conserve energy, capture fringe thoughts, and make your thinking more systematic

4/ This file helps you “keep your inner world awake,” reflecting on experiences to better understand them, and develop your skills as a writer and communicator

5/ This file will reflect your projects, areas of endeavor, and categories of interest (equivalent to Projects, Areas, and Resources in PARA) to track your intellectual progress and achievements over time

6/ A great source of ideas will be the books you read. Saving the best excerpts will not only improve your understanding while reading, but help you translate them into your own words

7/ Use your notes to reconstruct the arguments of others in more concise form if you need to, but mostly just scavenge from whichever parts of written works you can use for your own projects

8/ This file isn’t an accessory or support to your intellectual production, – it IS your intellectual production, with every idea preserved at a different stage of evolution on its way to publication