The 6 Words That Changed How I Think

My old belief was that storing all these links in a souped-up database would lead me to magically generate new insights about the topics I write about. After several years of banging my head into a wall, I realized that to generate new insights from these links I would need a new approach.

That led me to Zettelkasten, a technique for creating webs o... See more

When I write, I imagine reaching up to a higher plane to access my thoughts and assign words to them, yet the words I find are approximate and never capture the ideas as fully as they appear in my mind. This is why writing feels so hard to me: Its labor involves grasping for a perfect translation and always falling short. But ChatGPT reminds us tha... See more

thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.