The Writing Slowly stats page has been given a natty makeover. As a result I’ve learned it will take 18 hours to read this whole site. Good luck!
#IndieWeb #SmallWeb #DataViz #SlowLiving
Beginner’s mind: Flea turns to the trumpet
Here’s another great example of ‘beginner’s mind’ in action.
Flea, long famous as the amazing bass player in Red Hot Chili Peppers, has pivoted to jazz trumpet. As a kid he played trumpet with his stepfather, but he hadn’t played seriously in decades. That changed when he decided to make an album.
💬 “I decided I’m gonna play trumpet every day for two years, and at the end of the two years, I’m gonna make a record. I don’t know how good I’m gonna be at the end of two years, but I know I’m going on a two-year-long stadium tour with the Chili Peppers and I can play in my hotel room, and that’s what I’m gonna do, and that’s what I did. I practised every day for two years, and went and made my record.”
Did he know he’d be good enough after two years of daily trumpet playing? No, instead he used it as a forcing function. No matter what: put out the record.
💬 “I got insecure that I wasn’t good enough. But it was more being moved to tears by how vulnerable it felt, like I’m baring my soul. I was prepared that it might not work, that it might suck. I was prepared to fail. But I read this thing by Neil Young where he goes, “I’ve made shitty records and I still put them out because failure is important.” When I read that by Neil Young, someone I admire so much, I was like, f– yeah! If I fail, great. It’s beautiful to take a risk. If I fail, I f–ing tried.”
Well, by listening to his album, Honora, you can judge for yourself whether he failed (spoiler: he didn’t).
A review of ‘Honora’ in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Now read:
The greatest experts are serial beginners.
What Herbie Hancock learned from Miles Davis.
What Billy Strings learned from his father.
The fundamental flaw in how we learn about expertise.
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I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available right now.
AI is changing how we think. Many people now swap deep reading for building with agents. Is the Zettelkasten just a nostalgic relic of a Twentieth Century academic process? This article explores why “efficient” tech might actually fail our cognition.
💬 It’s intriguing that despite incredible, relentless waves of innovation stretching right back at least to Gutenberg, the age-old question of how best to write and publish for an audience is still not completely settled.
Will the last Zettelkasten practitioner please turn off the lights?
#Zettelkasten #AI #PKM #Philosophy
Will the last Zettelkasten practitioner please turn off the lights?
In the olden days (approximately 2010) there was a mass exodus to social media from blogging. It was like the Rapture but with tweeting. And today there’s a new mass exodus to AI from… well, everything.
It seems all anyone can talk about now, or even think about, is AI. Here’s some breathless reportage from the front line:
💬 “I replaced Netflix with Claude Code. I lie in bed thinking about what I can spin up before I fall asleep, what can run while I’m unconscious. Reading a novel feels indulgent now. Watching a movie without a laptop open feels wasteful. This voice in my head that says “something could be running right now” just doesn’t shut off. I’m not even building a company. I’m just addicted to building my random ideas.” - Token Anxiety | nikunjk.com
So maybe many of the people who used to be interested in the Zettelkasten, an approach to maintaining a useful collection of notes, are now interested in AI agents. After all, just look at those efficiency gains!
But it seems to me that the Zettelkasten concept was always rather antiquated. After all, it looks quite a lot like the fetishization of an obsolete process for writing academic papers by hand, that ended in the late 1990s when its most visible proponent, sociologist Niklas Luhmann, passed away, just as digitization took over.
Updating this site to Hugo 0.158 has caused the Search function to break. Normal service will shortly resume. 🤞
An update to the update: rolling back to Hugo 0.91 until plugins are updated. Search is back in action.
A mind like a skittish and unbroken horse
“Unless it is occupied with some governing object that restrains and disciplines it, the mind will scatter itself wildly across the vast field of imagination.” - Michel de Montaigne, “De l’oisiveté” (Essais, Book I, ch. 8), first published 1580.
It’s important to work with the end in sight, says Venkatram Belvadi. He says he limits the projects he works on concurrently to only two. This is laudable, provided it can be done. I can’t do it, and neither, apparently, could the French essayist Montaigne.
In fact, Montaigne didn’t know to what end he was writing. He simply (or so he claimed) recorded his disordered thoughts.
“[The mind] engenders within me so many extravagant chimeras and fantastical monsters—so disorderly and irrational, crowding upon one another—that, having leisure to observe their foolishness and grotesque strangeness, I have begun to keep a record of them, hoping that, if I live long enough, I may one day make my mind ashamed of itself.”
If you do know what you’re working on then Venkatram’s advice, no doubt, is very sound. He abandoned his Zettelkasten, his unhierarchical collection of notes, and replaced it with a series of folders. Meanwhile, I’m sticking with Montaigne and letting my mind wonder “like a skittish and unbroken horse”. To coral at least some of the prancing about, I’ve found my Zettelkasten to be quite effective. I wonder if I should add Montaigne to my deeply irresponsible list of writers with ADHD?
This video of Kurama-dera, a Buddhist temple outside Kyoto, is quite lovely. And the snowy scenery makes the place look completely different from when I visited it in late Summer.
Summer:
Winter:
📷 From time to time the world offers you an extraordinary, fleeting gift.
#photography #clouds
💬 “You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something.” - Sam Henri-Gold
Are you accumulating notes or actually creating something?
Semyon Vengerov gathered two million filing cards but never finished his dictionaries. What lessons does this Russian scholar offer for modern personal knowledge management?
#PKM #Zettelkasten #Writing #History #Notes