When he was still in high school my cousin took to pulling old cars apart, completely, then putting them back together. This was a real learning experience, and the beginning of an entire career working with motor vehicles. François Chollet, author of Deep Learning with Python, said:

💬 To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn’t come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models. - as quoted by Simon Willison.

This is what I’m doing with my collection of working notes, my Zettelkasten. I disassemble ideas and concepts, de-contextualise them, and reassemble them into new arrangements under quite different circumstances. From fragments you can build a greater whole.

Sometimes ‘invention’ is mashing together two or more existing ideas in new and unexpected ways. But sometimes it’s simply rebuilding an existing idea from the ground up, to create something previously unimaginable.

I wrote my book about the Japanese concept of learning, Shu Ha Ri, because in the fifteen years since I first encountered this concept, no one else had written a clear introduction. It’s quite literally the book I wanted to read for myself. Well, I certainly didn’t invent the idea, but in writing the definitive introduction I’ve certainly taken it apart, examined it from every angle, worked out how to explain it to others, and put it back together.

On Friday I received a nice text from a martial arts instructor, who’d been handed the book by someone else:

💬 I absolutely loved it. First time in a long time I immediately reread a book.

And so I hope you’ll enjoy giving the book a test drive too.

A vintage car is driving along a former railway line near Trawsfynydd, Wales, through a rural landscape with rolling hills in the background. Photo by Geoff Charles, 1962. National Library of Wales. Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales on Unsplash

Check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And you can also subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email newsletter.