People crushing it in business, writing, and creative work fill themselves with ideas.

But 98 percent of people aren’t doing it systematically every day.

Why you should create and build a Book of Wisdom throughout your life:
We tend to think we remember more than we do, but to a first approximation, we’ve forgotten everything we’ve learned.

By the time you've read a book or listened to a podcast, you retain a fraction of its fidelity, and the rest decays at an alarming rate.
Think about your favorite podcast episode and try to remember three things you learned from it.

Then read this distillation, which is only ten percent of what Balaji said.

This one exercise will change the way you think about your memory forever.

Unless you capture them, important ideas fade away in your memory exponentially.

But systematically harvesting value from the best sources you can find has the opposite effect.

When you create a Book of Wisdom, your ideas build on each other for the rest of your life.
Read actively every day and select important things.

Capture the thought, thinker, and source, then restate the thought in your own words.

This imperfect system has worked for centuries.

You don’t need fancy tools.

Software and the internet help you manage ideas, but building a Book of Wisdom is, in essence, a manual process.

Personal knowledge development cannot be automated.
Fortunately, you already have the most powerful learning technology ever developed: symbolic language.

Writing creates memories that never fade, giving you the ability to speak to anyone in time and space.

Including yourself, now and in the future.
That doesn’t mean you should save everything (Evernote got that wrong).

Learning isn’t an act of accumulation, it’s an act of negation, dependent not on your ability to remember everything, but on your ability to remember some things and forget others.
But there’s a reason the Greeks named the mother of all Muses the goddess of memory.

Today, the Muses are memorialized, and their name has been given to storehouses of knowledge.

We call them “museums,” and you can create your own.
The more serious you get about creating, the more systematic you'll get about taking great notes and selecting great sources.

When you follow your curiosity and pay close enough attention, you can’t help but create.
The most effective way to build your knowledge is do it by hand, one thought at a time.

Treat your reading as a life experience and take mental ownership of ideas that stop you in your tracks.
The promise of building a Book of Wisdom isn’t that you'll be smarter if you use it.

It's that you'll become a creator, building on the ideas of others and making them your own.
It's easy to forget that when writing was first invented, it was the first time in history people could speak directly to future generations in their own words.

The consequences of this ability are astounding.
The oldest surviving work of fiction tells the story of a king on a quest for immortality.

In the end, the king learns while we all must die, we can live forever through our creations.

The author died 4,000 years ago, but his creation proves his point.
Take this story to heart and build your own Book of Wisdom.

Preserve important thoughts so they live on in a meaningful way.

And make something out of them.

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More from @jmikolay

14 Jan
Ten years ago this week, Bret Victor spoke at a software engineering conference in Canada.

"I don't have any prizes to give out," he said. "I'm just going to tell you how to live your life."

Here’s a distillation of the talk that’ll change the way you think about your career:
There's a way of living most people don't talk about.

When you approach your career, you’ll hear a lot about following your passion or doing something you love.

I’m going to talk about something different: finding a guiding principle for your work.
The principle that guides my work is creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating. Without an immediate connection, many great inventions and theories will not emerge.
Read 34 tweets
11 Jan
I distilled the internet's best lecture about writing into a set of big ideas.

It's insane I wrote professionally before internalizing these truths.

The Craft of Writing Effectively – on Twitter and everywhere:
If you've been writing in school, you haven't been writing at all.

You’ve been writing for people who are paid to care about you.
Learning to write in a system where people are paid to care about you doesn’t just leave you with neutral habits, it leaves you with terrible habits.

You get used to the idea that people are going to read whatever you write.
Read 25 tweets
10 Jan
I read and synthesized 4 of the most influential books of the past decade:
-The Beginning of Infinity
-The Origins of Creativity
-The Rational Optimist
-Sapiens

Here's what they say about human progress, potential, evolution & creativity:
Progress starts with rebellion
-Rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge
-Refusal to accept the present order of things
-@DavidDeutschOxf @carlorovelli
The potential for human progress is unlimited.

The more human beings have exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be. And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process.
-@mattwridley
Read 23 tweets
3 Jan
Goal Setting for the Creative Process—a framework for publishing more in 2022 than the rest of your life combined:
This week @SahilBloom published "The Goal Setting Guide," a framework for successful goal setting.

As usual, he presents a better, clearer way to think – and his framework is simple to understand.

Sahil’s framework is powerful for setting goals in any category.

But it’s invaluable in one specific category:

The creative process.
Read 24 tweets
1 Jan
In 2021 I did 75 Hard, a program created by Andy Frisella.

I distilled 15 things I learned that can help anyone seeking to change in 2022:
My inspiration to start the program came from @heydannymiranda

Danny wrote, “Every time I do this program, it changes me. The level of focus, consistency, and discipline bleeds into other areas of my life.”
The structure of 75 Hard is simple:

1. Stick to a diet w/no cheat meals and no alcohol
2. Drink 1 gallon of water
3. Work out twice, 45 min. each, at least 3 hours apart
4. Read at least 10 pages of a non-fiction book
5. Take a selfie

Five things. Every day. No exceptions.
Read 21 tweets
20 Sep 21
The next time you get down about someone else doing well on Twitter or elsewhere, remember:

It used to be someone else’s success could have a meaningful impact on your potential in life.

Today that’s no longer true, and here's why: 🧵
On the internet, you can (and should) assume all forces except your own creative output are negligible.

It’s the one thing that explains successful people online.
The scale of opportunity on the internet is so large, and the rewards so great, all other variables, including the success of others, go to zero.

This is true even though power laws govern outcomes and small differences between outliers generate runaway outcomes.
Read 10 tweets

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