Have you ever feel like your head is all full to the point of bursting? Not just with information, but also ideas and things that you want to do, things that you hope to do.
That’s what I feel like right now.
Reading has always been a very integral part of my life. Growing up, it filled me time and my head with wonderous new ideas and information. It brought me to new places, fantastical places that I wouldn’t have imagined, if it weren’t for books.
As an adult, reading keeps me updated with what I need to know for work. But recently, I was at a point where I have all this information and I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve mentioned it in a twitter thread below:
This might be a long thread about reading, and creating something out of that reading. So here we go.
Everyone reads for different reasons and everyone reads different genres and topics. One rabbit hole I followed lead to something called digital gardens, which is an interesting concept for me. You read and cultivate the information on topics that you like. Like how a gardener may nurture the plants in their garden.
This tweet specifically, which lead to a whole other rabbit hole.
Which led me to learn about https://nesslabs.com/, founded by @anthilemoon . I love love love this site because it talks about brain and mind productivity.
This is when I started dabbling with my own digital garden, trying out the different version of tiddlywiki and http://Are.na but I still didn’t know how to really use it until I found a book that was mentioned in her website.
How to take smart notes
And this book blew my mind. It basically shows me that what I’ve been doing all this while was just the tip of the ice berg in getting and retaining information.
I took the Gallup Strength and Input is one of my dominant themes. This means that I’m a hoarder.
Not so much in the physical things but information, to file away for the fun of it. And this book basically helped me to categorise the information I need into something that can be used to create out of it.
Using the Zettelskasten method created by Niklas Luhman ( I recommend reading about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann). The basic idea is categorise the different information you have in a way that you can easily recall, and allows you to connect different pieces of information together to create something new.
The book is targetted to Academics, students, and non-fiction writers. But as someone who collects information, little nuggets of info, it’s a wonderful way to put everything into context.
Because without context, it’s just useless information.
So I ended up with sticking to Tiddlyroam, a wiki type program hosted locally on my computer that gives me the ability to see how the different topics are link via a visual component.
Basically it creates a mind map without me needing to do it myself.
And treating this as an external brain. Ultimately, I’ve changed the way I read non-fiction things. I read with a notebook, to write in interesting things in my own words.
To be able to write a topic in your own words, shows that you have true understanding of that topic.
So read a lot, read widely. Take smart notes. Build your own repository of information.Create something out of that information.
Have I created something out of it? Not yet.
But I think that being able to piece all the different parts of the journey together in a twitter thread is a good start.
TL;DR
Read a lot, create notes, write essays.
Originally tweeted by Minty Mintea (@mintea) on 2020-09-08.
More than 2 months have passed and I haven’t really done anything yet. The hardest step is the first one. So here is what I’m going to do.
I’m going to state it out here that by end of the year, I will have a new website/blog up with 2 articles published a month. It will be about science or related to science.
Because I believe that if I don’t state it out into the universe my intention, it’s never going to happen.
Minty Mint Tea 