Writing Slowly

Two Million Notes and No Dictionary: Learning from Semyon Vengerov's Cautionary Tale

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:49:05 +1100

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 Semen Vengerov’s two million notes, a modest promise fulfilled.

—-

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): 94â€“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. 129â€“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

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:35:39 +1100

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

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:01:44 +1100

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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.”

—-

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.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:57:06 +1100

ROOTS - Return Old Online Things to your own Site.
That’s what Lisa Charlotte Muth is doing at her website. And that’s what I’m doing with posts like Some urgent note-making questions find answers - bringing scattered material back together.

#IndieWeb #PKM #Blogging #NoteTaking #DigitalSovereignty

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:23:41 +1100

Podcast listening overtakes radio? The New Publishing Standard.

Congratulations are due to Dave Winer for an amazing achievement. Micro.blog has a great discovery tool for interesting podcasts. RSS FTW!

The name might be archaic, but at least they didn’t call it downloadable radio.

#podcasts #radio

Some urgent notemaking questions find answers

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:00:00 +1100

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 me¹. 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.

Question: Where does AI fit into your note taking?

“I considered using AI to scan and auto link related ideas, but even this seems like robbing me of the chance to “think” as I examine possibly related ideas, so for now I am trying to be totally manual in the slip box. Anyone else tackling these questions? What successful strategies do you have for getting the thinking benefits while still getting the busy work benefits of AI?”

My Answer: The temptation to skip the thinking process is far from new.

In 1924 Sergey Povarnin, yes that Сергей Поварнин, Soviet author of How to Read Books for Self Education was warning of it:

“There are readers who think that with such ‘card indexes’ they can replace their mind… In short, a new ‘improvement’ in our culture. No need to work with the mind. Ready-to-wear boots, ready-to-wear pants, ‘ready-to-wear’ thoughts.”

He was OK with the card index itself; the problem was imagining you could use it to stop thinking.

And for the last 17 years I could have outsourced my note-making to a service like Freelancer. But I didn’t even consider it back then, so why consider it now? It would be like hiring someone to go to the gym for me (which I admit I have contemplated).

Question: Should I keep my Zettelkasten?

“I have now essentially two systems of notes, and I’m not sure how to reconcile them. Should I rework these new notes back into my Zettelkasten and just focus on publishing that? Should I keep two systems of notes? Has anyone run into this issue before?”

NB: A Zettelkasten is a box with paper slips in, a once-popular way for scholars and writers to make and keep their notes, and by extension it’s the name of a contemporary method for making digital notes too; but is there a Zettelkasten method?

My Answer: Just give everything a unique ID so you can link to it from anywhere.

I’ve had this issue to some extent, but it was the Zettelkasten that freed up my writing. Before that I’d write sprawling stuff that was all over the place. This kind of writing felt like it was too digressive, so I’d try to focus — but this made me just clam up. Or I’d write a long piece but get bored part way through and drop it before finishing.

The Zettelkasten approach helped me focus without making me feel like I was writing the wrong things. Then I started stitching my various notes together to create longer pieces of work. Eventually the practice started freeing me up to write digressive pieces again, without feeling irrationally guilty about it. So now I have my structured Zettelkasten and a whole pile of longer pieces in various states of completion.

My ‘solution’ to this (though is it even a problem?) is to give each and every piece, however short or long, a unique ID.

That way I can always refer to any piece of writing, and always find it again.

I’m inspired by Niklas Luhmann, who didn’t just write sociology notes, he also wrote many manuscripts in several drafts. Towards the end of his life he mainly worked on the manuscripts since he had a backlog of publishing to get through. Like him I’m ultimately more interested in publishing than in perfecting my notes system.

Question: Highlighting for literature notes

How do you highlight content? I’ve always tried progressive summarization, but I feel like I don’t have that much time.

My Answer: For me, highlighting is a shortcut to nowhere.

I’ve found my highlights don’t get used for anything. My conclusion is that highlighting may look like useful work, but in practice it just isn’t.

Resulting rule of thumb: if it’s worth highlighting it’s worth writing a short note about it; and if it’s not worth writing a note, it’s not worth highlighting.

What I do instead: write a note. If I read something and think “that’s interesting”, I make a note and force myself to record why I find it interesting. This seemingly slows me down, but then I don’t waste time creating unused highlights that looked interesting for reasons I didn’t record and have now forgotten.

Caveat: while reading, I write literature notes that include bibliographic details, followed by a list of interesting points I notice, together with a page reference. I might write: “Opinionated summary of ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ - p.127.” I’d follow that with a reference to the note that expands on this. In practice, I don’t actually get round to writing a new note for every reference. Some never get followed up. The Zettelkasten approach is a way of triaging my thoughts, creating useful friction so I only follow up what really matters to me.

Question: Should Mini Essays Be Kept Outside of the Main Notes Folder?

I like writing mini essays to help me understand things better, but I’ve read that main/atomic notes should be short and focused on one idea. Should mini essays go in a separate folder, or can they live with my main notes?

My Answer: Your ‘mini-essay’ concept has been tried and tested for many decades and it works. Keep them with your notes so you can easily reference them and expand them.

Maybe tag them ‘mini-essay’ so you can review them collectively in future.

I’ve found - once my Zettelkasten got big enough - I tended to work by assembling clusters of atomic notes, rather than jumping straight to mini-essays. The Zettelkasten approach facilitates this ‘bottom-up’ method of writing.

Andy Matuschak shows how he wrote a modular mini-essay made out of about 60 atomic notes. He redrafted it and turned it into a polished essay which he then published. The original mini-essay is called Enabling environments, games and the Primer. It’s clearly a work-in-progress, but it’s a lot more comprehensive than just a single atomic note. It’s an example of what he calls ‘evergreen notes’ in the sense that it grew from a seed into a larger plant (though I’m not actually sold on that metaphor, but still).

I described the process in full, in an article which is itself assembled from modular components:

How to write an article from your notes.

I certainly keep my ‘mini-essays, or ‘sub-assemblies’ or ‘intermediate packets’ or ‘alpha drafts’ or whatever, in my main collection of notes. This enables me to link to them and add future links to them. But one very important step is to ensure that where the writing is made up of smaller parts, the backlinks are clearly noted, so I’m not inadvertently self-plagiarising.

To me a mini-essay is just a structure note, but with the contents of the linked notes transcluded and then lightly edited together. You can certainly see this with Andy’s note, referenced above. Parts of that note are little more than hyperlinks connected together with connecting phrases. But the hard work is precisely in connecting disparate ideas by means of writing. This kind of stitching work doesn’t usually produce a publishable article straight off, but it does help with an early draft.

That’s all for now, but if you’re strangely hooked on this stuff (not your fault, and no one here is judging) you might now like to go even further with:

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.. And for all the crunchy, fresh Writing Slowly goodness you can sign up to the weekly digest.
It’s exactly like a bunch of radishes, but made out of email.

Well, me and lots of other people. ↩︎

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:26:31 +1100

The Digital Humanities Now website has come out of hibernation and kicked back into gear. OK, so it took me a whole year to notice this, but better late than never to spot a very interesting resource.

#DigitalHumanities #AcademicWriting #AcademicResources #ResearchTools

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:50:37 +1100

AI isn’t making us obsolete: we already were, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Promethean shame in an age of technological change.

#Philosophy #PrometheanShame #AI #FutureOfWork #ethics #GüntherAnders

Fear of AI is nothing new: Promethean shame in a time of technological change

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:00:00 +1100

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…

…a kind of embarrassment at being human when faced with the apparently superior capabilities of our technology.

In the first instance this reveals itself as embarrassment at the high quality of manufactured goods compared with hand-crafted items, but it’s a corrosive shame: not merely shame at our comparative lack of skill, but more insidiously, shame that we ourselves were born, not manufactured.

💬 “Our aim is always to create something that could dispense with our assistance and function perfectly without us. In other words, nothing less than appliances through whose functioning we make ourselves superfluous, eliminate ourselves, liquidate ourselves. It is of no consequence that we only ever approximately achieve this goal. What counts is this trend and its maxim, which is: “without us!".” — Günther Anders, ‘The Term’.

In February 2026 Greg Knauss wrote a much-noticed blog post, entitled, Lose myself, about his feelings of obsolescence as a computer software engineer.

“💬 What I am talking about is being replaced, about becoming expendable, about machines gaining the ability to adequately perform a very specific function that was previously the exclusive domain of skull meat.”
“What I’m talking about is that nothing I do matters. That nothing I can do matters.”

With mass lay-offs in the tech industry, many people might have been feeling this sense of existential redundancy, but Manton Reece, also a long-time software creator, took a different view, perhaps the ‘glass half full’ approach, which may indicate that there’s a certain degree of subjectivity to Promethean shame. In Not faster, now possible he wrote:

💬 “If all we see is the work we currently do being replaced and done better by robots, we’ll miss everything that will make software companies successful in the future — a thousand ideas that could improve people’s lives in small ways.”

Whether you personally feel obsolete or not, and whether or not AI is coming after your own job, Anders’ thought is also relevant in terms of the apparent failure of the popular imagination in relation to AI’s future impacts.

Anders’ wrote of ‘inverted utopians’. Whereas the original utopians were unable to create what they could imagine, modern humans are unable to imagine what they have created.

💬 ‘We Are Inverted Utopians’: The basic dilemma of our age is that ‘we are smaller than ourselves’, incapable of mentally realizing the realities which we ourselves have produced. Therefore we might call ourselves ‘inverted Utopians’: while ordinary Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing. (Günther Anders, 1962: 496)

This might sound strange until we consider the starry-eyed pronouncements of contemporary leaders of technological change. They promise their innovations will deliver extraordinary improvements in productivity and wealth but are unable to give any real details. This has been characterised as CEOs aspiring to be Thomas Edison while talking like P.T. Barnum. They imagine themselves to be innovative geniuses while their business model demands they treat their shareholders like suckers. But an encounter with Anders’ thought suggests this flummery may be more an inherent feature of technological change than a deliberate intention to deceive.

Author and literature professor Alan Jacobs observes that there’s a massive gap in the public discourse about how AI is impacting the economy:

💬 “I keep hearing AI advocates say that the universal deployment of AI will create a “productivity explosion” and “unprecedented wealth creation” and will “end poverty.” All I want to know is: How? How will the money made by the big AI companies end up in the pockets of the poor? I’m not even asking for a plausible scenario — I’d be happy to see any scenario at all, anything more than “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.””

Reading this I imagine how the CEO of OpenAI or Anthropic might respond. Perhaps by gaslighting us about how we should just be happy that everyone else is feeling really bullish. But having also read Anders, I feel perhaps these CEOs couldn’t imagine their own technology, even if they sincerely wanted to. Maybe the technology itself precludes such understanding.

Anyway, I’ve written about this before, back in 2023, when I suggested that more than ever, embracing your humanity is the way forward. And, oh look! It still is.

When I consider the crude Trumpian fixation on ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ I can’t help feeling that there’s a certain adolescent American narcissism about the need to avoid being seen to be a ‘loser’.

In the civilised world, this desperation may seem pathological. After all, from cradle to grave, each one of us will definitely experience periods of complete helplessness, where we are utterly dependent on the support of others. But in a society with few or broken social safety nets, it’s quite possible that a fear of ‘losing’ is hardwired into the population by means of a politics which names, targets and materially punishes ‘losers’ of all kinds. So it’s ironic that large language models (LLMs) and other AI technologies, which now seem to make everyone a loser, have been invented in this America and are being touted there as the brightest and best future.

As with all such promises, it’s worth asking ‘brightest and best for whom?’ If the technology’s benefits flow upward, as they tend to, then the losers it creates will be many, and the imagining we need to do, of alternatives, of resistance, of what it means to be human, becomes a necessity rather than a luxury.

And there’s a third sense in which Anders’ thought is relevant today. He argues that humans aren’t just technologically obsolete, in the sense that the tools and systems they invented have outclassed them. They’re also morally obsolete. Anders reached this viewpoint from having lived through the German population’s reception of Hitler, in which many quietly, even willingly, accepted their role as functionaries in a technocratic totalitarian system, and the Holocaust as a system of mass murder, and the atomic bomb as a technology of mass destruction. Having invented unimaginable power it was hard to imagine how to handle it. The atomic bomb was the clearest possible example of this moral deficit: having invented our own extinction it was now impossible, collectively, to turn it down. It was as though the morality required for the Twentieth Century was unavailable to those who lived there.

Günther Anders has been called a philosopher of the apocalypse. But really he’s a philosopher of the day before the apocalypse, reminding his readers that it’s still not too late; that choices can still be made; that in spite of appearances we can still make them.

Reflecting on Anders’ philosophy, Indian educationalist Badruddin (2026) argues that what’s needed is “a transformative educational model that prioritizes ethical literacy, existential reflection, and critical engagement with technology… a pedagogy that not only resists passive adaptation to technological systems, but also fosters autonomous, ethically grounded individuals.”

That’s laudable, but what kind of education can foster an ethical approach to the use of AI, beyond simply accepting the default settings and whatever our corporate overlords decide we must now use? I guess we’re going to find out.

And while we’re working on this, it’s important to recognise that AI isn’t suddenly making us obsolete. As Anders reminds us, we already were. But this isn’t a counsel of despair; it’s a recognition of the enduring human condition. My range is me and though that might be tough it’s simply nothing to be ashamed of.

What's the true path of excellence?

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:35:25 +1100

Brad Stuhlberg’s book The Path of Excellence is a great read and it offers what the subtitle promises:

💬 A guide to true greatness and deep satisfaction in a chaotic world.

By now I’ve read many similar works and I’ve found there’s often something strangely missing. There’s usually heaps of good advice about acquiring expertise and wisdom, about learning and improving, and about following through; plenty too about commitment, discernment, patience and resilience. And these are all important factors if you want to attain excellence and some sort of mastery.

Well, OK. But there’s almost no mention of the need to find a teacher, coach or mentor — and to work constructively with them. And in this particular case I find it slightly weird. After all, the author is himself a performance coach, so why not at least mention the great benefits of working with a coach?

I see this as the most crucial aspect of learning, of trying to get better at something.

Learning is social: we learn best from other people, directly. That’s a key reason I was driven to write my own book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning.

Reading all these American books on learning and improvement, I can’t help wondering if there isn’t a bias towards individualism at work here. Not that there’s anything wrong with individualism, but surely it isn’t the whole picture. Learning involves teachers. Is this claim so radical that it can’t be mentioned?

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. There’s a well-tested path and it’s clearly expressed in these three phases of the learning-teaching journey.

So sure, read another book about excellence. There are plenty to choose from.

But also, find the right teacher.

Now read:

What Billy Strings learned from his father

What Herbie Hancock learned from Miles Davis

The greatest experts are serial beginners

There’s a flaw in how we learn about expertise

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 13:59:08 +1100

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].

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:20:47 +1100

💬 I want to be just like him.

Imitation is one of the most powerful and underrated stages of learning. Billy Strings' story of learning guitar by watching his dad is the clearest example I’ve ever seen.

writingslowly.com/2026/02/2…

#Learning #Education #Music #ShuHaRi

"I want to be just like him"

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:00:57 +1100

“I want to be just like him.”

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of imitation as a crucial aspect of the learning journey. But it’s also hard to describe it in mere words.

In this deeply engaging YouTube interview with Rick Beato, virtuoso bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings recounts the way he learned his guitar skills early, at his father’s knee, by watching, by joining in. and by continually asking: “how does dad do it?”.

I’ve never seen a clearer example of the role of the imitation stage of learning, and exactly how it works.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.

Now read: Find the right teacher.

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 06:46:16 +1100

💬 “If it takes three years, find the right teacher.”

Sometimes the best way to find the right teacher is to start doing the work. Begin your learning journey visibly, and mentors may find you - like the barn builder who attracted an expert just by working in his driveway. Read more: writingslowly.com/2026/02/0…

How did you find your mentor?

#Learning #Mentorship #Writing #Creativity #Action #shuhari

Find the right teacher

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 03:00:00 +1100

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.

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 12:00:37 +1100

Discovery, aesthetics, and the art of self-publishing: my latest post explores Leonard Koren’s influence on my new book, Shu Ha Ri.

writingslowly.com/2026/02/0…

#WabiSabi #ShuHaRi #Japan #Aesthetics #WritingCommunity

Leonard Koren on Life as an Aesthetic Experience

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:58:06 +1100

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.

I hadn’t really understood the national Japanese obsession with bathing, but once I realised there are natural hot water sources all over the place in this volcanic archipelago, and how culturally central they are, and how refined the Japanese have made the whole bathing experience, I was completely hooked. In fact, returning to Australia, it feels strangely hard to live without it. Happily, a new spa and sauna has just opened up in our little neighbourhood, where my partner is already enjoying her season ticket. Come the Autumn, or even sooner, I’ll surely be joining her.

Which brings me to Leonard Koren, the august founder in the 1970s of ‘Gourmet Bathing’ magazine. He tells that story in a podcast interview. What particularly drew me to the interview though, was his account of how he came to write what he’s best known for — his cult book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. This book, published in 1994, has pretty much inspired not one but two cottage industries: one that centres on the concept of wabi-sabi, which now counts literally dozens of books exploring every possible angle of the term; and a second cottage industry that revolves around the exploration of Japanese concepts other than wabi-sabi, of which there are also now dozens. Who among us has not now heard of ikigai (finding your purpose), kaizen (continuous improvement), mono no aware (beauty in impermanance), shoshin (beginner’s mind) and so on and so forth?

Time Sensitive Podcast S11 E128 - 2 April 2025.Leonard Koren on Life as an Aesthetic Experience

I learned a few things from this podcast.

First, I learned that Leonard Koren had always intended to self-publish his book.

“When I made the first book," he said, “I thought it would be extremely niche… I realized that I would have to publish it myself.”

Second, I was happy to hear him fully owning the little secret of Wabi-Sabi, that there’s no such thing.

“Let me just be very clear: In Japanese there is no term wabi-sabi, OK? There’s an old word, ‘wabi’ and an old word ‘sabi’. If you look in the Japanese dictionary you won’t find wabi-sabi, period.”

Third, I was very taken with Koren’s description of his creative life:

”My life is essentially an aesthetic experience. Everything I know, everything I take in, every idea I have, comes to me through my senses. And then it’s processed.”

Well, Koren’s book is, quite clearly, the direct inspiration for my own, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

They’re both short, just 100 pages.
They’re both direct, covering one concept and one concept only.
They’re both Artist’s books, including photography (mine has 20 photographs of Japanese gardens, which I took myself).
They’re both originally self-published, to enable a singular, perhaps eccentric vision to find full expression.
They’re both the first book on a Japanese concept that no one in Japan, or anywhere else, has written yet, at least not a long-form treatment.
They’re both at the leading edge of an emerging trend.

Wait! What? What emerging trend is this? Well, I waited 15 years for someone better qualified than me to write about the concept of Shu Ha Ri. No one did. At least, no one else wrote a clear, well-referenced, accessible introduction. Eventually I relented, wrote the book I wished already existed, and put it out there for readers to make their own judgement. But what do you know? Very shortly after I published my own introduction to the concept, another appeared, written by the partnership of Hector Garcia and Nobuo Suzuki. It’s in Spanish only for now, but the English version is published by Tuttle in August 2026, so perhaps soon there’ll be a Shu Ha Ri cottage industry. You heard it here first.

On my recent visit to Japan I walked past a gift shop in the small city of Matsumoto called ‘WabiXSabi’ (yes, in English), and it turns out there’s a whole chain of these stores across Japan. So maybe one day in the future someone will open a Shu Ha Ri shop, selling who-knows-what. Maybe it’ll be a footwear store. You heard that here first too.

But here’s word of warning to anyone thinking of trying this: Best not be selling anything fragile. Translated literally, Shu Ha Ri means ‘hold, break, leave’.

—

As you might have gathered, 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 that handy email format you know and love.

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:06:21 +1100

Every interface is an argument about how you should feel. - Phantom Obligation | Terry Godier

This is my view of writing and note-making apps, but we can change them, to feel how we want, not how someone else wants us to.

Make your notes a creative working environment.

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:24:32 +1100

A channel of the Katsura River at Arashiyama, Kyoto.
Reviewing my photographs really makes me wish I was back in Japan.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.

#Japan #Kyoto #ShuHaRi #JapaneseCulture #JapaneseAesthetics #Photography

The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne's Missing Commonplace Book

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:34:34 +1100

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.

Not that we shouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t help wondering at the sheer immensity of what must have been lost to history in this way. Admittedly, my childhood poetry and my sister’s school reports aren’t entirely essential for the public record, but what about the other items that well-meaning tidiers have chucked out? Some proportion of them, surely, must have been priceless.

Writing survives through luck and neglect

Given all the destruction of the centuries, and even just the spring-cleaning, it’s amazing that so much of the past still remains available to us, especially through the writing of contemporaries.

To take just one famous example: Leonardo da Vinci’s notes were almost lost because he left them to his favourite student, whose son inherited them and neglected them in a mouldering attic. Despite — or perhaps because of — the neglect, the notes survived and so today we can still marvel at Leonardo’s quickness of thought, virtuosity of line, and genius of innovation.

It’s a big win for forgetting to clear out the attic.

We’re not quite so lucky with John Donne, the poet of the English Renaissance, whose name, for some reason, is pronounced ‘Dunn’. His poems survive, but his commonplace book is currently lost — though its trail is tantalizingly clear.

According to Katherine Rundell’s lively biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Donne gave it to his eldest son, who left it to Izaak Walton’s son in his will. That made sense because Walton was Donne’s friend and biographer. But Walton’s son in turn left all his books and papers to Salisbury Cathedral. And that’s where the trail goes cold.

The commonplace book is completely missing.

Perhaps one day they’ll rediscover Donne’s commonplace book. If it’s ever found, Rundell says, it will cause ‘joyful chaos’ among the Donne community. On reading this I couldn’t decide which I loved more: the delightful concept of joyful chaos, or the endearing fact that there’s such a thing as the Donne community.

Donne’s genius depended on gathering scraps

The loss, for fans of the poet, is particularly frustrating because Donne wouldn’t be Donne without his commonplace book. He lived in what we might call the golden age of commonplacing. It was an era that nurtured his collector’s sensibility and his obsession with hoarding the quotations of others. As Samuel Johnson said disapprovingly, in Donne’s work “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”

But this magpie tendency, as Rundell calls it, to gather and juxtapose, was hardly a flaw; it was central to his genius. Throughout his poetry, Rundell says, “one thought reaches out to another, across the barriers of tradition and ends up somewhere fresh and strange.”

Though Donne himself coined the term ‘commonplacer’ (another fact I learned from Rundell’s biography), the practice itself was codified by Erasmus, the doyen of Dutch humanism. He instructed readers to create headings at the top of each page, such as beauty, friendship, faith, hope, the vices and virtues. Then, while reading, you’d note down anything striking: a story, a fable, a pithy remark, a clever turn of phrase. The result was both a form of scholarship and a map of your own obsessions. Donne’s book, says Rundell, surely included: angels, women, faith, stars, jealousy, gold, desire, dread, death.

But of course, we don’t know. We haven’t seen it.

The purpose of the commonplace book wasn’t mere collection. As Erasmus explained, whenever a witty occasion demanded, you’d have “ready to hand a supply of material for spoken or written composition.” But despite this, the commonplace book wasn’t really designed for regurgitation. It offered raw material for a combinatorial, plastic process; a process that was half evidence-building and half treasure-hunting.

Like any intellectual pursuit, commonplacing created anxiety about doing it right. Even back then the market naturally monetised that worry, by selling ready-made commonplace books with the quotations already filled in. I find this amusing, but buying pre-compiled wisdom surely defeated the point. It’s the early equivalent of getting a chat bot to do your homework for you: easy but almost pointless.

The work itself is the point.

Sir Robert Southwell, President of the Royal Society, left some headings in his commonplace book forever blank (Academia and Tedium, tellingly), while others left him scribbling in increasingly tiny handwriting at the foot of the page, crossing out headings to make space. Each commonplace book is the unique record of the workings of a unique mind.

Donne built palaces from unrelated bricks

You can see the commonplace book’s influence throughout Donne’s poetry. In a single poem he might reference Aristotelian logic, Ptolemaic astronomy, Augustine’s discussion of beauty, and Pliny’s theory on poisonous snakes. In a poem about sexual inconstancy, he compares women to both foxes (apparently fairly normal for his day) and goats (apparently and understandably unusual).

The Twentieth Century poet T.S. Eliot understood what made this work. “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work,” he wrote, “it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.” For ordinary minds, experience remains chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. But for Donne, as Katherine Rundell observes,

“apparently unrelated scraps from the world were always forming wholes. Commonplacing was a way to assess material for those new connections: bricks made ready for the unruly palaces he would build.”

Donne himself was alert to the danger of mindless compilation. In his poem “Satire 2,” he mocked writers who merely copied others' words and regurgitated them as their own: like someone who eats your food and then claims the resulting waste as their supposedly better creation. Harsh, but memorable. And yes, the analogy certainly did make me think of ChatGPT and its copyright-denying siblings.

But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Others' wits' fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Rankly digested, doth those things out spew,
As his own things; and they are his own, ‘tis true,
For if one eat my meat, though it be known
The meat was mine, th’ excrement is his own.

What lessons emerge from a book we’ve never seen?

First, you can’t simply jam together random quotations and expect to produce thoughtful prose. Johnson accused Donne of yoking heterogeneous ideas together by violence, yet Eliot saw that Donne’s “perfectly equipped poet’s mind” achieved something remarkable. The rest of us may need to work harder to overcome the illusion of integrated thought and produce the real thing.

Second, commonplacing risks collecting other people’s words without fully digesting them. Apparently there’s a German word for the kind of writing this can produce: Zitatsalat, ‘citation salad’. There are other methods — the Zettelkasten system, for instance, which I prefer — that encourage reflection and connection-making from the outset. I’ve taken a minimal approach to making notes, with just these affordances.

Third, it’s important to publish, not least because unpublished notes often end up lost. Leonardo da Vinci’s notes barely survived. Donne’s commonplace book is long gone (though I encourage you to check down the back of your sofa just in case). A scholar of the philosopher Charles Peirce recently told me that after Peirce left his voluminous papers to a university library, they reused them as scrap paper. Happily, someone realized the error before too much damage was done. And to cap it all, my own poem about the toe of the year nearly didn’t make it. And these days, when you’re gone someone will eventually press “delete.” Better to get your words out there while you can.

A short postscript:

Indeed, this very article was almost the victim of delayed publication. I wrote this, mostly, three months ago. Then my iPad’s note-writing app developed a mysterious glitch which made the app and all its notes unusable. Only the happy fact that I’d backed everything up ensured my words would be saved from the digital wreckage. Otherwise, oh the horror, as with Donne’s Commonplace book, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

—

Further reading:

Rundell, Katherine. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. ( see especially pages 36-39, the source of most of the quotes here )

Leonardo da Vinci’s notes

Overcome the illusion of integrated thought

A minimal approach to writing notes

Get your words out there by publishing first

—

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 that handy email format you know and love.

Why your note-making tools don’t quite work the way you want them to - and what to do about it

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:40:47 +1100

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.

Kei’s article attempts to makes sense of memory in pair of dimensional scales: latent-living and taxonomic-associational.

Latent Memory
Refers to knowledge stored but not actively used.
Exists in archives, databases, or written records.
It is inactive until accessed or brought into practice.
Living Memory
Knowledge that is actively transmitted and practised.
Maintained through oral traditions, rituals, and cultural engagement.
Keeps information dynamic and relevant in everyday life.
Taxonomic Memory
Organises knowledge into structured, hierarchical categories.
Examples: Encyclopaedias, scientific classifications.
Emphasises order and standardisation for clarity and retrieval.
Associational Memory
Links ideas through relationships, stories, or spatial metaphors.
Examples: Songlines, memory boards, or thematic connections.
Encourages flexible navigation and creative associations.

These four modes describe the different ways societies and individuals store, organise, and activate knowledge, ranging from static archives to dynamic cultural practices and from rigid hierarchies to fluid networks.

A summary of the framework described in Kei Kreutler’s article.

I’ve found this framework really illuminating. In particular the taxonomy highlights for me the point that our tools and methods lead to different outcomes. We shouldn’t expect latent, taxonomic memory devices (archives and catalogues) to perform the same functions and achieve the same outcomes as living, associational memory devices (lore-in-action).

It’s well worth reading the whole article. This four-fold framework clarifies the tension I often feel between my note-making intentions and my note-making tools. Whereas the standard tools tend towards latent, taxonomic memory, I’m far more interested in living, associational memory. And until now I didn’t quite have the right words to express this.

Well, this theory is all very well but how does it play out in the real world? Here’s a very practical example of what living, associational memory might look like in practice. The philosopher David O’Hara uses his bookshelves as a teaching device. As he discusses philosophy with his students he pulls the relevant books from his shelves, to create a pile of a dozen or more texts that he calls a ‘shelfie’.

Stored in the bookcase these books are latent memory, but this memory is activated by the discussion; it comes alive. Left on the shelves the books are ordered in some form of standard order (by subject or alphabetically, or whatever), but as they get pulled off the shelves to illustrate the discussion they become ordered by association. Then the hour is up and the little pile is re-shelved.

Every so often, my partner insists on reorganising our bookshelves in our living room. Apparently we have too many books, which is obviously not possible. Anyway this shuffling of the stacks drives me unreasonably crazy, makes me feel like I’ve undergone a lobotomy - and now, finally, I understand why: my extended mind has been messed up. My living, associational memory is undone, I’m being assailed by entropy.

So what’s the practical relevance of all this? Open up your note-making tool, whether that’s Obsidian, Notion, Apple Notes, a text editor, a collection of notecards, or a physical notebook, and ask yourself: is this designed for latent/taxonomic memory or living/associational memory?

I bet no one’s ever suggested that to you before, so how can you tell? You can look at how it wants you to organise things. Does it push you toward folders and tags, and hierarchies? Does it emphasise search and retrieval? That’s taxonomic thinking. Or does it encourage links, and serendipitous discovery, and bringing ideas into conversation with each other? That’s associational.

Then look at what it encourages you to do with your notes. Is it easy to transmit your precious knowledge (I’m guessing it’s precious), to share it, to get it out of your note-system to interact with the world? That’s heading in the direction of living memory. Or does it encourage you to store your knowledge away, to archive it rather than pass it round or create something with it. That’s oriented towards latent memory.

None of these dimensions are wrong in themselves, but knowing which type of memory your tool is optimised for helps explain that nagging tension I was feeling. You might be trying to use a filing cabinet like a conversation partner, or vice versa.

The question isn’t “which tool is best?” but “does this tool match what I’m actually trying to do?”

—–

Some further reading:

Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget

In this post I explore the dual nature of memory and forgetting through note-making and discuss how my notes become “conversation partners” with my future self - because I’ve forgotten what my past self thought. But I also consider that selective forgetting may have some advantages.

Don’t throw away your old notes

Though I didn’t know it at the time, this post is directly relevant to living vs. latent memory, because it’s about the Zettelkasten as a “conversation partner between my old self and my current self” and it considers how to create the right conditions for serendipity and associational connections.

My favourite tool is this notebook I made

This is about how I modified TiddlyWiki to suit me better. I wanted a rhizomatic tool for writing, and since I couldn’t find one I really liked, I adapted one for my own purposes. You might not need to invent your own tools, I said, but each of us gathers uniquely the unique contents of our own toolbox. And yes, when I grow up I want to be an aphorist.

How to write a better note without melting your brain

This is a practical guide to writing a note that might actually reach its potential. I also discuss Tim Ingold’s contrast between “textilic” (weaving) vs. “architectonic” (architecture) modes of creation, which I’m pretty sure is relevant to associational vs. taxonomic thinking.

What to do when you’ve made some notes: Write something

This post is all about the latent/living dimension, because here I’m suggesting that the point of making notes is to make something else with them, probably for others to read. Yes, it turns out I am quite opinionated about what I want to achieve with my tools. And if you click this link you’ll see a picture of me hard at work in my study overlooking the Sydney Opera House. That has to be worthwhile.

—–

The Spiral of Mastery: Why the Greatest Experts Are Serial Beginners

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 22:56:07 +1100

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.

Experts Get Stuck Because They Stop Looking

But you can reach a point where it’s hard to see how to improve, or if it’s even worth it. For creative practitioners, there may come a moment when the work loses its spark. You’re competent, maybe even accomplished, but something vital has drained away and it feels like you’ve reached the plateau of your expertise. You can’t see what to improve because you’ve stopped looking. So you repeat what works because it works. Meanwhile, beneath the surface, your joy is slowly curdling into staleness.

There’s a cultural dimension to this trap. Experts aren’t supposed to feel like beginners. So we stay on this plateau, defending our position rather than climbing higher. The writer Ernest Hemingway understood this. Despite his Nobel Prize and decades of acclaim, he insisted: “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” He wrote to a friend of his that “dopes would say you’ve mastered it”, but he continually felt like an apprentice.

How Do You Actually Get Better?

In their book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool show that expertise is built through deliberate practice: the systematic isolation and refinement of specific sub-skills.

Take that tennis serve we all struggled with on holiday. Total proficiency is really just a messy stack of mastered micro-movements. You have the grip and the swing mechanics, but also the ball toss, the contact point, and the tactical intent. A player gains expertise not by playing endless matches but by drilling these elements until they’re second-nature. For writers, the equivalent sub-skills are less obvious but they still exist. It might come down to the rhythm of dialogue or the way a transition sentence functions, or to opening hooks, sensory detail, and the painful art of compression. Drilling these exercises might feel artificial because to an extent it is. But the artificiality is exactly what creates the conditions for focused improvement.

I found the map of learning: Shu Ha Ri

The traditional Japanese framework, Shu Ha Ri, maps this growth as a recurring cycle, a sort of beautiful, never-ending loop that keeps things interesting no matter how far advanced you become. In the Shu phase, you just dive into the work. It’s this foundational, deeply immersive period of copying a master’s handwriting or holding a racquet in that specific, stiff posture that eventually starts to feel like it’s natural (please don’t challenge me on this — as I say, I still can’t actually play tennis). Early on you’re essentially acting as a mirror, reflecting something great until it sticks.

Eventually, you move into Ha, the breakout phase. This is where the tinkering starts. It’s the time when you really start to play. You begin questioning the rules and adjusting your grip, or just messing around with sentence rhythm to see where the tradition ends and your own unique voice begins to shine through.

Then there’s Ri. In this Zen-like space, the rules have been digested so deeply they just… click. The skill happens through you rather than by you, which is a pretty incredible feeling when you finally hit that flow. I certainly haven’t reached this level with tennis, but I have had such moments while playing squash. It’s not so much that you’re playing the game as that the game is now playing you. But the best part is when the top of that mountain reveals a much bigger, sun-drenched one hiding right behind it. You’re invited back into Shu. The master becomes a student again, starting over with a fresh sense of humility and a genuine, open-eyed curiosity for what’s next. The danger is that as an accomplished expert it all gets so serious that you might forget you can go back to the start, you can still play, you can have fun.

You can pivot from expert back to beginner

If you look, you can sometimes see this same recursive loop even at the top of the pop charts. Here’s a well-known example: Taylor Swift during the pandemic. She’d spent a decade building her massive, glitter-cannon “pop industrial complex.” Then, suddenly, she retreats. She ends up in a flannel shirt, recording folklore in a bedroom, where she’s obsessing again over the fragile mechanics of acoustic storytelling like she’s still a teenager. She had to junk the “superstar” persona if she was going to rediscover the songwriter underneath.

But it isn’t always about these polished pivots from glossy stars. There’s also Dick Fosbury at the 1968 Olympics. Before he showed up in Mexico City every “expert” high jumper on the planet was using the barrel-roll technique. This was basically a face-down belly-roll over the bar that everyone agreed was the limit of human potential. They’d already reached the end of what a scissor jump could achieve and now the barrel-roll was pretty much the rule.

Then Fosbury turns up and decides to jump over the bar head-first and backward instead.

It looked absurd. Here was this gangly young engineering student with mismatched running shoes, who looked like a camel on two legs, as the papers said at the time.

During his Shu phase of figuring it out, he was probably hitting the bar with his neck, landing on his head, and looking like a total amateur while everyone else was doing the proper barrel-roll technique. He had to be willing to look like a flop on the world stage just to prove that the experts' way of jumping was actually just a false ceiling that he could break through. If you watch the old footage, you can see way he has to psych himself up, then the hesitation in his run-up. There’s an electric, shaky moment where he has to choose to trust this new, unproven movement over the mastery he was supposed to have.

Backwards and head-first? It turned out not to be a flop at all. Instead he’d perfected the world-beating Fosbury Flop which almost everyone has used or adapted ever since. But this wasn’t magic. The reality is they’d only recently introduced deep foam mats for a safe landing. You can see this progression in a youtube video called Men’s high jump through the years! Fosbury saw this as an opportunity to become a beginner again, to try something new, and he took it, and it worked.

High jumper Dick Fosbury clearing the bar during 1968 Olympic trials at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Then, going back to pop, there’s the singer PJ Harvey. By 2007, she could play a rock guitar better than almost anyone alive. So, naturally, she decided to stop. She sat down at a piano, an instrument she barely understood, and forced herself to write the album White Chalk. If you listen to that record, you can hear the ghost of the beginner in it; there’s a kind of haunting, shaky tension, perhaps because her fingers don’t quite know where to go.

In an interview she said, “the great thing about learning a new instrument from scratch is that it […] liberates your imagination.” But I suspect she became a novice on purpose because she knew the “expert” version of herself was running out of things to say. And that’s not all. During the White Chalk tour she started performing on autoharp, another instrument she hadn’t perviously been known for.

You can see both instruments on this Youtube video from the time. PJ Harvey - KCRW 2007

PJ Harvey performing live at the Royal Festival Hall in London, United Kingdom on September 27, 2007. Ella Mullins, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Beginner’s Mind

Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who brought Zen to Northern California, noted that “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” It’s an interesting way of looking at the world.

Execution requires certainty, the ‘few possibilities’ of the expert. But learning thrives on an open-ended sense of wonder, the ‘many possibilities’ of the beginner. Shoshin (Beginner’s Mind) is really just an intentional suspension of ego. It means looking at a weak sub-skill with total openness, gently setting aside that heavy, defensive armour of past achievement we all carry around. In the real world, this looks like a novelist with multiple published books happily sweating over a basic copywork drill. It’s an established painter returning to the simple magic of primary color-mixing, or a senior developer diving into a new language with the same enthusiasm they felt as a total novice. It’s Taylor Swift going back to basics; it’s Polly Harvey learning a new instrument live on stage; it’s Dick Fosbury attempting entirely the wrong kind of jump.

“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.

This openness is how you get the spark back. The plateau can sometimes dim the spark that made you pursue this path in the first place, but you can always find it again. To counter that staleness, you just move back into the learning zone. You embrace the risk of failing, a risk which is really just a part of the adventure, and you adopt that open, beginner’s gaze.

Where Do You Start?

Our tennis serves were still inconsistent after that Christmas holiday experiment. Our footwork was a joke. Actually I don’t think we even had anything you could properly call footwork. But still, the court felt alive. Breaking the skill down into its basic components was the thing that killed the frustration and let the joy back in.

If you’re not sure where to start with improving your writing, try this: Look at your last five finished pieces. What do they all avoid? What scenes do you consistently skip or rush through? That avoidance is a signal that this area can use some work. It might be action scenes or emotional confrontation. That’s your sub-skill.

Right now, pick one sub-skill you’ve been avoiding. Not your whole practice. One component. Dialogue attribution. The first sentence of a scene. If you’re an artist, maybe it’s colour mixing. Then set a timer for 15 minutes and drill only that. Don’t worry about the “big picture.”

Just wade, waist-deep into the spiral of continuous learning and let the flow take you.