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The well is poisoned now with AI slop, but even years ago when I was looking online for information on Shu Ha Ri, there were plenty of mentions but it was all extremely shallow. There were hot takes from martial arts sites and almost clueless discussions about agile software development. True, they mentioned the concept but not where it had come from, or really any context. They were skimming the surface of a very deep pond. I wanted something more substantial and so I started researching.
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To this day there is no accessible introduction to Shu Ha Ri, and nothing in print with credible references that you can follow up yourself if you want to. So I saw a gap that was begging to be filled.
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No one else had done it. I mean I’m not the world’s greatest expert on Japanese culture, but no one else wrote the book on Shuhari. My first draft was written in 2015 and I gave the world another 10 years to write the book on Shuhari. No one did, so in July 2025 I published my own book myself. Ironically, another introduction to Shuhari was finally published, in Spanish, two months later.
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I had a bee in my bonnet, put there by the literature on learning. It’s heavily learner-focused, which is fine, but very often it misses out entirely any mention of the role of teaching, which is not fine. This seems plainly weird, and in my own small way I wanted to make a contribution to correcting this. Learners need teachers, and what’s more, the teachers need to be humans, not bots. I saw the Japanese concept of Shuhari as a way of emphasising this point, that learning and teaching are two sides of the same coin.
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Following on from this last point, I wanted to present a different approach to learning theory, one with is about social interaction, not just neuroscience. Understanding the brain is great, obviously, but learning and teaching takes place in an environment that extends well beyond the individual brain.
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All the news the media missed in 2025 fixthenews.com (via Miraz Jordan.)
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“The right kind of optimism is disciplined. It begins with the premise that action changes outcomes, then organizes institutions, incentives, and narratives to make that premise true.” mongabay.com.
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The Sydney I know isn’t like what they’re showing on the news writingslowly.com.
Two Million Notes and No Dictionary: Learning from Semyon Vengerov's Cautionary Tale
Russian bibliographer Semyon Vengerov (1855-1920) spent his life accumulating two million filing cards, but he died before he finished the dictionaries and bibliographies he set out to create.
His definitive account of Russian books from 1788 to 1893 was supposed to extend to 25 volumes, of which he completed only three. His biographical dictionary of Russian writers included six volumes, but these only covered the first three letters of the Russian alphabet. He published four volumes of his Sources for a Dictionary of Russian Writers, without making any more headway on the dictionary itself.
So was he a visionary scholar or did he end up simply overwhelmed by the weight of his own ambition?
And for anyone building a personal knowledge system today, for anyone doing their own research, for anyone making their own notes, his story raises an uncomfortable question: are we just accumulating notes, or are we actually creating something?
Historian Mark Gamsa summarizes it this way:
“For some of his critics, Vengerov’s colossal undertaking ended in deserved failure. In this view, his story is at best a cautionary tale about a scholar overwhelmed by his material; at worst, it is one about a wrong choice of profession” (Gamsa 2016).
Literary scholar Angela Brintlinger is more specific about the problem:
“Vengerov was unable to cull and organize the materials he gathered into true biographies. He was overwhelmed by the process and by the facts themselves. Vengerov’s approach to biography suffered from a very particular problem: wanting to include everything, he never finished anything” (Brintlinger 2018, 96).
To be sure, Vengerov died before he finished what he’d started. But having published prolifically and influenced a generation of Russian scholars, was he really a failure? Or does calling him one say more about the unrealistic scope of what he promised than about the value of what he actually achieved?
What Are Notes For?
If you find yourself writing notes and later discover that you now have rather a lot of them, there’s an underlying question which begs to be addressed, if not fully answered: what are they for?
Many people write notes simply because the act of writing is a way of thinking. They might agree with physicist Richard Feynman that writing is thinking. At the very least, you can’t really write without thinking. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann made an even stronger claim: you cannot think without writing, at least not systematically. As he put it in a note lodged carefully in his Zettelkasten:
“Behind the Zettelkasten technique stands the experience: You can’t think without writing - at least not in a sophisticated way, selective access to memory in demanding contexts. This also means: without marking differences, one cannot think.”
From this perspective, notes, at least in the first instance, are complete in themselves; they are thinking made visible.
Vengerov went much further than this. He appreciated “the love of, or rather the passion for scholarly labour as such, almost independently of the results that follow from it” (Byford 2003:7). He understood you actually had to enjoy the task, moment by moment. He lionised the painstaking, meticulous scholarly work epitomised by the Benedictine monks of Western Europe:
“The very process of work gives a true scholarly labourer a kind of pure psychological pleasure.” (Ibid.)
Well I’ll admit I’ve experienced a little of this in writing here about a now obscure Nineteenth Century Russian bibliographer. I mean, what am I thinking? Many though, myself included, write notes because we want to produce, well, writing: blog posts, articles, video or audio scripts, books even. In short, we want a public outcome. And given this aspiration, there might be a frisson of anxiety about whether, like Vengerov, we’re just going to end up with two million notes and no dictionary.
Lessons from the Cautionary Tale
So having encountered Vengerov’s extraordinary story, and taking it as a cautionary tale for note-making maximalists like me, here’s what I’m taking from it:
Under-promise and over-deliver
Vengerov wrote and published a great deal and was very influential. He was a great success! The only problem, really, is that he didn’t finish the dauntingly massive projects he himself had set out in public to finish. This made it look as though he failed. But in reality, who could have succeeded at the gargantuan tasks he embarked upon? In 1899 a contemporary of Vengerov’s, V.F. Shishmarev, argued:
“The love of learning compensates for all failures and all shortcomings that inevitably accompany the practical realization of any project.” (Byford 2003: 3).
I’m not so sure. For me, it’s worth finishing things, perhaps by limiting their scope.
Vengerov’s approach (announcing a massive 25-volume project and then appearing to fail to deliver it) contrasts sharply with that of Linus Torvalds, the founder of the near-ubiquitous computer operating system Linux. Torvalds famously opened his project with great modesty, claiming in his initial 1991 announcement that it “won’t be big and professional” and “probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks.”
By setting expectations low, every achievement became a triumph rather than a shortfall. Linux now powers everything from smartphones to supercomputers.
The lesson here isn’t that you should lack ambition. It’s that you might consider announcing smaller milestones, while still, privately, pursuing larger goals.
Bite off less than you can chew
Take a step at a time, package it up, and call it a product. Then take another step.
Bent Flyvbjerg, the expert in mega-projects, claims the most successful large projects are completed by means of modularity. The Empire State Building, for example, was completed one storey at a time. A similar, relatively small process repeated over and over produces something bigger. Each floor was a complete unit; if construction had stopped at any point, there would have been a usable (if shorter) building.
Applied to note-taking and writing, I take this to mean: publish the limited article before attempting the extensive book. Release the provisional blog post before promising the comprehensive guide. Each complete smaller work is both valuable in itself and a building block for something larger.
Work collaboratively and delegate
Perhaps Vengerov could have finished his huge projects if he’d assembled a team to help him. As a postgraduate student, I was tangentially involved in a large dictionary project, and it was very clear back then that a project of this nature requires a large number of participants. Very rarely is such a task a one-person show.
Ironically, Vengerov was highly influential with the next generation of scholars whom he had trained. Perhaps his greatest legacy was the influential Pushkin seminars, which he started in St Petersburg in 1906. The formalist school, many of whose members he had taught, owed a great deal to him. But his own projects seem to have lacked the kind of team effort that might perhaps have seen them to completion. He knew how to teach and inspire others, but it seems he couldn’t translate that into collaborative production on his own work. My conclusion is, if you can’t do without a team, you should at least attempt to assemble one. Or, you know, just get someone to help you.
Use the data, don’t let the data use you
Fortunately, Vengerov’s students emulated his scholarly meticulousness without getting bogged down in his precise method. As Brintlinger puts it:
“Without the ‘data’ preferred by their professor, the biographies produced by the students would have lacked precision and verisimilitude; however, at the same time, the students moved past Vengerov’s fact-bound research to try to draw connections and make judgements about the psychological reasoning behind the actions of historical individuals.” (Brintlinger 2018, 114).
For me, this is perhaps the most important lesson. Notes, research, and data are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Vengerov’s students understood that scholarship means doing something with the facts: analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, and ultimately, publishing. The two million filing cards were only valuable if they led somewhere beyond themselves.
A modest promise
So was Vengerov a failure? That depends on what we measure. He didn’t complete his stated projects, true. But “having published prolifically, Vengerov nonetheless did not complete his life’s work. He did leave an archive containing about two million filing cards” (Gamsa 2016). Importantly for Russian literary scholarship, he left a generation of scholars who learned from both his successes and his struggles.
This is the point where I might be expected to reach a conclusion, so here’s my attempt at one: the perfect comprehensive work may never be finished, but imperfect, incremental contributions can still matter enormously. Breaking down the task and making modest promises: these options always remain open. Far better to have published three volumes than to have left twenty-five in perfect form in your head. Better to have published one real volume than three imaginary ones. And if you do have a huge project in mind, it wouldn’t hurt to inspire others who will continue the work, perhaps in ways you never imagined.
Your two million notes might never become the definitive work you once envisioned. But they might become something else: something smaller, more focused, and actually useful. Or better yet, they might help you think clearly enough to create a series of smaller somethings, each complete in itself, each, like my little essay on Semyon Vengerov’s two million notes, a modest promise fulfilled.
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Now read:
What to do when you’ve made some notes: start writing.
Inside Georges Didi-Huberman’s monumental note archive.
Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn’t mean you have to.
Leibniz created a haystack of notes that wouldn’t fit in his Zettelschrank.
Thoughts are nest-eggs: Thoreau on Writing.
References
Brintlinger, Angela. “Lives and Facts: Biography in Russia in the 1920s.” The Slavonic and East European Review 96, no. 1 (2018): 94–116. www.jstor.org/stable/10…
Byford, Andy. “S. A. Vengerov: The Identity of Literary Scholarship in Late Imperial Russia.” The Slavonic and East European Review 81, no. 1 (2003): 1–31. www.jstor.org/stable/42…
Gamsa, Mark. “Two Million Filing Cards: The Empirical-Biographical Method of Semen Vengerov”, History of Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 2016), pp. 129–53. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.10…
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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Artists Books at the NSW State Library
I visited the State Library in Sydney recently, where I was inspired by an exhibition on artists' books, called Paper Universe: The Book as Art. It’s open till 3 May 2026 and is well worth seeing.
There were books on display too about how to make your own books, which I also found inspiring.
And when I looked in on another exhibition about housing in Australia, I couldn’t help noticing that the Sirius Building, a famous brutalist landmark in Sydney, looks an awful lot like a set of books lined up along a shelf. I’ve never heard anyone say that this was the architect’s intent, but you can judge for yourself.
Photo of the Sirius Building by Katherine Lu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.p…
I guess I have made my own book: I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And for all the Writing Slowly goodness you can sign up to the weekly digest.
Why I wrote the book on Shuhari and what’s in it for you
Well, a book doesn’t just write itself, but why should I be the one to write it? What made me decide to write an introduction to the Japanese concept of Shuhari? There were several reasons and here are five of them.
So anyway, I did the research, I read scores of books and articles, I took endless photographs (of which readers only get to see the best ones), I chased up obscure references, many in Japanese, with which I needed to gain at least a basic familiarity, and I visited Japan. Oh, and I wrote the book, designed the cover, and published it.
The result is Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, For Artists and Fighters. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful.
One reviewer said:
”Simple in its structure, yet profound in the information it conveys, SHU HA RI is a must read for anyone wanting clarity on a tried and true approach to teaching and apprenticeship. A great resource for teachers, but also anyone interested in learning how to honor the teachings of precious masters while respectfully forging ahead.”
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Now read:
Japanese Shu Ha Ri: Is it better than Western learning methods?
There’s a fundamental flaw in how we learn about expertise.
Mastering any skill the Japanese way.
And of course, my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and FIghters.
Some urgent notemaking questions find answers
From time to time I attempt to answer questions about note-making on Reddit.
It’s a tough job with few perks, but someone has to do it and for no obvious reason that person is me[^1]. So here’s a fresh bunch of my recent comments, with a disclaimer that, field-tested as they are, they’re not guaranteed to make you rich, famous or even mildly handsome, even if that’s how it’s worked out for me. I guess life is unfair like that.
Anyway, here goes.
Fear of AI is nothing new: Promethean shame in a time of technological change
Günther Anders (1902-1992) is a 20th century philosopher for our time, which is fitting since he saw himself as uncomfortably ‘too early’ for his own.
Almost unheard of in the English-speaking world, he was at the centre of German philosophy before the rise of Hitler and the catastrophe of the Second World War. Student of Husserl, Heidegger, and later Tillich, he was a second cousin of Walter Benjamin, a friend of Berthold Brecht and was Hannah Arendt’s first husband. Given this pedigree I found it surprising he was (to me) so obscure. In post-war Germany he was a big deal. Now he’s back in fashion, thanks to the eery prescience of his masterwork, The Obsolescence of Man (vol. 1, 1956, vol.2, 1980) and its clear relevance to the current AI revolution.
Anders coined the phrase ‘Promethean shame’, which is…
Guy Kawasaki says ‘move fast and break things’ is a myth. True! But since he can’t quite escape its toxic allure, I’ll say it for him, loudly and proudly:
Move slow and fix things. [guykawasaki.substack.com]
Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters is available now.
Beginners and intermediate learners fear ‘making mistakes’; experts seldom do. Not because experts don’t make mistakes: they do. It’s just that experts know what to do next.
Here’s Herbie Hancock telling what he learned from his mentor Miles Davis: Every mistake is an opportunity [openculture.com].
Find the right teacher
There’s a Japanese saying that I included in my book):
If it takes three years, find the right teacher.
But sometimes, you just need to get started. Simon Sarris has a great story about this. He decided to build a barn by trial and error, with little previous barn-building experience. But because he was doing this near the road in front of his house, it attracted the attention of a regular passer-by who just happened to know, in detail, how to build barns.
“Mike would have never stopped by if I was not working conspicuously in my driveway, every day, under a pop-up tent. But I was, and he became interested in my progress, and it happens that he has been timber framing since the 90’s. Had I waited for such a teacher—for he has now taught me a good deal—I would have never found him. But I chose to start, and he was drawn to my adventure. Only by virtue of starting the work was the intersection of our lives possible.” - Start With Creation - by Simon Sarris
The moral? If it takes three years, find the right teacher. But if you start your learning journey with action, the right teacher might just find you.
So now here’s a question: Who was the right teacher for you, and how did you find them, or alternatively how did they find you?
(And yes, I have a story about a teacher who found me, but that’s a story for another time.)
Photo by Kazuhiro Yoshimura on Unsplash
Meanwhile, my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, is out now. Please check it out.
Leonard Koren on Life as an Aesthetic Experience
I’ve never been much of a bathing person. Perhaps that’s due to unpleasantly lingering memories of luke warm water in freezing cold bathrooms in the UK when I was a child. The bath was fine enough, but getting out would be a real test. Even bathing, as an adult, in natural hot springs on Orcas Island in the US Pacific Northwest didn’t really do it for me. That was a little ‘rustic’, and not in a good way.
True, swimming here in Sydney where I live is fabulous, especially in the Summer, when the cool refreshment of the ocean waves is totally restorative. But bathing? Not so much. Until a few months ago, that is, when I visited Japan.
The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne's Missing Commonplace Book
Last month, while my sister was moving house, she discovered a box of papers she’d never seen before. Inside was a collection of documents, decades old, that our parents must have gathered and kept from our childhood. There in a carefully wrapped pile was a sheaf of my sister’s old school reports. And next to them was a set of poems I must have written way back when I was a primary school student.
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of venturing into the attic or the basement and finding long-forgotten documents like these. But this chance rediscovery got me thinking about just how much has been lost to time.
Mostly we don’t bother archiving, and even when we do, there are later moments when we decide to spring-clean, rationalise, declutter, or tidy up.
These are all euphemisms for destroying the evidence.
Why your note-making tools don’t quite work the way you want them to - and what to do about it
Every so often I stumble upon a really clear articulation of a concept that makes sense of something I’ve been feeling but didn’t previously have a word for. I knew there was something there but I didn’t have the language to express it.
One of the most interesting articles I’ve come across recently is Artificial memory and orienting infinity by Kei Kreutler.
In this particular case the concept illuminated is the subtle, niggling tension between what I want to use my digital writing tools for and what they actually do. My writing tools, and possibly yours too, nearly do what I want, but not quite. What’s that about? Well, on reading this article, the tension became a whole lot clearer.
The Spiral of Mastery: Why the Greatest Experts Are Serial Beginners
The greatest experts aren’t afraid of starting again
Apparently, my tennis is rusty
Here in Australia the Christmas holidays take place in mid-summer, and my family spent a few days at a house with a tennis court. It was an amazing opportunity, for which we were hardly prepared. I hadn’t played in years. One family member had barely held a racquet before. But we all shared the same problem: our serves were terrible. The ball hit the net, or it veered wildly off court. The serve seemed like some monolithic, unreachable skill you either had or you didn’t.
The view from the court — that was amazing, but the tennis, to say the least, wasn’t flowing.
That was until someone suggested we break it down: grip, swing, ball toss, contact. We stopped trying to play and started drilling. Within a short while, the court was alive with movement and we were laughing instead of frowning with effort. Our natural talent hadn’t changed; it was just that our willingness to break the seemingly impossible into achievable parts made it somehow seem doable. And after a short while, it actually was doable. We were delivering serves that made it over the net, that you could also imagine returning.
This experience was a reminder that expertise is hardly ever about making a single massive effort to achieve something that seems impossible. You don’t get good at tennis all at once. Playing the game well is really a whole portfolio of tiny pieces of expertise you have to master one by one and piece together smoothly before you can reach actual proficiency. And even when you get there, that’s not the end. There’s always something, some element of your play, you can improve. Is mastery a destination to reach and then enjoy forever? No. It’s more like a spiral that requires us to return to the beginning again and again of a long series of micro-skills.
The posts of 2025
I’m much better at writing new stuff than consolidating the old, but it’s time to review what’s been posted here during 2025. Short posts excluded, it’s quite a lot, considering I’m Writing Slowly.
There’s also a list of the posts of 2024 and the posts of 2023 too.
And don’t forget to check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
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Fact checking the good news
I expect 2026 to be a better year than 2025, not through some kind of magic but because millions of people like you and me are working hard to make it so. Since I posted a link to a round-up of the under-reported good news from 2025 someone said ‘some of this was definitely written with ai, so might be worth fact checking 😂’.
I was a bit disappointed, since I wanted the good news to be true, and since I have to admit this could easily make me susceptible to getting taken in by unreliable slop. Well, life’s too short to check all the facts, even if someone is wrong on the Internet (obligatory xkcd link), and that famous cartoon of the guy trying to fix it is actually an accurate drawing of me[^1]. But I thought I should at least do a quick audit. And what did this reveal?
The right kind of optimism in 2026
Happy New Year! May the next 12 months bring you peace and joy and blessing.
Here are a handful of hopeful articles to get your 2026 started on a positive note. I especially recommend the first one which I found deeply inspiring.
The Unity of Pen and Sword: Understanding Bunbu Ichi
My recent book is subtitled “The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters”. But why artists and fighters, and why mention them together?
In medieval Japan, warriors weren’t really expected to choose between intellectual pursuits and martial prowess. Instead they were required to master both. This philosophy is captured in the concept of bunbu ichi (文武一), which literally means “the civil and the martial are one.”
The Sydney I know isn’t like what they’re showing on the news
Tragically my home city has been in the international news for all the wrong reasons and we’re all feeling traumatised and shocked and heartbroken.
What about you?
You only know what you see in the media, like the photo below. So beyond the Harbour and the Opera House, perhaps you don’t know what Sydney is actually like.
I thought I’d show you a snapshot of what it’s really like where I live, on Bidjigal land, the unceded territory of the Eora Nation.
Shu Ha Ri and the philosophy of interior design
The late interior designer Professor Shigeru Uchida discusses the importance of Shu Ha Ri for design:
💬 “The current education system lacks “Shu.” There’s a total absence of the attitude to observe, study, and learn from others. The term “breaking the mold” is common, but without having learned anything from others, one cannot depart from or break away from anything.”
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now in paperback and ebook.
Trying to write slowly in 2025
Before I really got going with the Zettelkasten approach to making notes (and with micro.blog) I was publishing only a handful of posts here each year.
But then my productivity exploded.
In 2023 I published 202 posts here, and this post equals that count for 2025, even though the year isn’t done yet.
In 2025 I also edited a collection of essays and published my own book.
So I’m quite happy with the year’s output. And thank you for reading along with me, I really appreciate it.
But don’t worry, in 2026 I’ll still be trying to write slowly.
This little book would make a great present for the artist, fighter, learner, teacher, or straight-up Japan-lover in your life. Just saying.
Imitating the greats?
Imitation can be a very effective form of learning, but it’s worth considering who to imitate, and how.
Writers often seek to imitate the greats, but it interesting how far the star of some supposedly timeless writers can fade. Here’s William Zinsser, the well-read author of ‘Writing to learn’, on how he did it.
“Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it. S. J. Perelman told me that when he was starting out he could have been arrested for imitating Ring Lardner. Woody Allen could have been arrested for imitating S. J. Perelman. And who hasn’t tried to imitate Woody Allen? Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else’s writing. They think it’s unethical—which is commendable. Or they’re afraid they’ll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become.”
So who are these people I’ve never heard of, I wondered, who could all have been arrested for imitating one another? I mean, they couldn’t, could they? It’s not actually illegal, is it? Or did Zinsser mean plagiarism?
It turns out that Ring Lardner was an American sports journalist and satirist whose work was greatly admired by many of the major authors who were his contemporaries. In his high school newspaper Ernest Hemingway used the pen name, ‘Ring Lardner Jr’. Lardner became a friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and he inspired the writing of John O’Hara (another great writer whose name is seldom heard these days). In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger gave Lardner a backhanded compliment by having his protagonist, Holden Caulfield, name Lardner as his second favourite author. So for Hemingway at least the juvenile imitation seems to have extended to impersonation.
Clearly I need to read some Ring Lardner.
S.J.Perelman was a humourist, writing especially for the New Yorker. He was admired by T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Garrison Keillor, Frank Muir, and Woody Allen. Another writer I’ve never heard of, who seems to have been inspirational. But then…
“Who hasn’t tried to imitate Woody Allen?” Is a question I’ll leave hanging in the wind.
Author and academic Adam Roberts has an interesting post about Jonathan Buckley’s novel, One Boat (2025), which appears to use Laurence Durrell’s adjectives as a model for how one of his own characters might over-write their diary. Durrell is an author whose star has certainly faded, even though he was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. And his style is certainly not admired these days. As Roberts says,
“giving his narrator these Durrellisms: the point of this adjectival affectation, or addiction, is to characterize her as someone groping, somewhat desperately, for expression, or the impossibility thereof”
Well, whether this is a deliberate imitation in order to show a diarist whose purple prose, like Durrell’s gallops away from them, or whether, as Adam’s seems to suspect, it isn’t, whether Buckley was doing something very clever and ‘meta’ with his character’s imitation, or whether he was just getting away with it, all the same, the novel was long listed for the Booker Prize.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.