books
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“Small pieces loosely joined”. — From fragments you can build a greater whole.
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“Everything is miscellaneous”. — What does it mean to write from the bottom up instead of from the top down?
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“The smartest person in the room is the room”. — The mastery of knowledge is an illusion.
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“The Internet is not made out of content”. — What comes after content?
📚 Spotted in a charity store, the most ambitious book title I can remember. Can anyone beat it?
How to learn deliberate practice
Have you heard of ‘deliberate practice’?
You might well have, because Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson’s work on what makes an expert has been hugely influential over the years. His co-authored original paper from 1993 [^1] has been cited more than 3,000 times and it has spawned more than a few popular books, including Geoff Covin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Malcom Gadwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.
Oh, those titles.
The key message of ‘deliberate practice’ is simple but not obvious. If you want to become an expert you have to do the right kind of practice. This was stated very clearly in Ericsson’s widely-read book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016):
“If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the ‘right way’ is.”
This is an attractive message because it’s very optimistic. It encourages people to overcome the fatalistic worry that somehow, maybe due to their genes or their upbringing, ’they’re just not cut out for it’.
Instead of being resigned to your fate, you can change it. And the key? Deliberate practice!
Unfortunately, the strong popular interest has warped some of Ericsson’s key ideas about how to gain expertise. Two concepts in particular have made it hard to move forward productively.
Why must sci-fi author Ted Chiang state in The Atlantic that AI is not conscious? I call this La Stilla Syndrome: my Jules Verne-inspired name for the delusion our technology is alive. Chiang doesn’t buy it and nor should we.
#SciFi
#ArtificialIntelligence
#TedChiang
#JulesVerne
#TechPhilosophy
Currently reading: Eight Million Ways to Happiness by Hiroko Yoda 📚
Japan is a deeply secular country full of shrines, temples, festivals and ceremonies. This book unpacks the paradox by exploring spiritual life in Japan as it’s actually lived, not the rather warped Western fantasy version.
Memory isn’t a static recording but a constant act of reconstruction. Every time we revisit a note or a book, we are weaving together the original content with our current environment and past self.
“We construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them.”
So how do we decide what’s worth preserving and what we must allow ourselves to forget? Explore the “differential allocation of attentional resources” in this look at the fallibility of memory.
Link: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#CognitiveScience #Philosophy #Memory
There’s a unique magic in the physical bookshelf. It acts as a spatial memory palace where a spine or a colour can trigger a flood of recollection. ‘Remembering What you Read’ looks at why reorganising a library feels like reorganising a mind, and what it really means to be “well-read” in this time of digital summaries and ephemeral content.
“The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me.”
#Bookstodon #HomeLibrary #ReadingLife
Remembering what you read
One of the chief uses of note-making is to help you to remember what you read.
But it’s not as simple as imagining your notes are just an ‘aide memoire’.
When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it. So making notes is inevitably a process of interpretation, which involves the occlusion of the original work, albeit in the name of preserving it.
Psychologists, including Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, authors of Memory Lane: The perfectly imperfect ways we remember (Princeton UP, 2025) believe “we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them”.
So when we re-read our notes, does that mean we’re reconstructing our memories of the book, or just the memories of our notes?
‘Beginner's mind’ keeps you young — even in your 80s
Stewart Brand was on the Ezra Klein Show, talking about his new book Maintenance: Of Everything. He’s well into his eighties, and he said:
“Looking into the things that you’re not good at, especially intellectually, is one way to stay young, because you’ve got a beginner’s mind.”
Well now, it was Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who brought Zen to Northern California, who famously spoke of ‘beginner’s mind’. He said:
“When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can learn something. The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless… The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind. … This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner” – Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind: Prologue.
Brand’s mention of beginner’s mind isn’t the only Japanese concept he references. The cover of Maintenance: Of Everything alludes to kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery by means of gold lacquer. With kintsugi, instead of hiding the cracks, you honour them.
You can read the interview’s transcript, or just listen.
My source for this little nugget was Austin Kleon, who also has a new book out in September 2026: Don’t Call it Art.
Meanwhile, I’ve written more about beginner’s mind, and why the greatest experts are serial beginners.
In Influence is everything I’ve mentioned Stewart Brand’s idea of ‘pace layering’.
“Pace layers is an idea Stewart Brand first developed in the 1990s. Civilization, he argued, works as a set of nested layers, each moving at a different speed: fashion changes fastest, then commerce, then infrastructure, governance, culture, and finally nature, which changes slowest of all. The fast layers are where novelty happens, but the slow layers provide stability. Healthy societies need both.
Each layer also requires its own kind of maintenance—and when any of them gets neglected, the whole system suffers.”
And I’ve also reflected on Austin Kleon’s advice about Sharing what you know.
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I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in the classic email format that never gets old and never goes out of fashion.
Notes about notebooks?
Ulkar Aghayeva writes about the history of laboratory notebooks.
Aghayeva, U. “A Brief History of Lab Notebooks.” Asimov Press (2026). DOI: 10.62211/52wg-76ye
Source: Scott Nesbitt’s The Monday Kickoff - well worth subscribing to.
#notetaking #notebooks #historyofscience
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
💬 “The Net is not content.
There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
A teenager’s first poem, the blissful release of a long-kept secret, a fine sketch drawn by a palsied hand, a blog post in a regime that hates the sound of its people’s voices — none of these people sat down to write content.
Did we use the word “content” without quotes? We feel so dirty.” — Doc Searles and David Weinberger, New Clues
Plenty of my thoughts about writing, and writing for the Web, are really just paraphrases of something David Weinberger has already said with far greater eloquence and perspicacity.
And what do you know? the author has a new book out in October 2026:
No doubt Beautiful Particulars will also help reshape my brain, and maybe yours too.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if this article piqued your interest you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest, where you’ll find yourself in an exclusive club whose privileged members just get a weekly email.