collecting/ gathering

We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.

Sammelband: A set of disparate texts, separately printed and later gathered in a single binding

Before you build a second brain, you must feel things in your gut. Without this connection to your innermost self, your note-taking system will become a digital junkyard. You’ll capture cool ideas, tweets and articles. You may even build a fancy knowledge graph in Roam. But if you don’t have gut feelings about what’s worth keeping, you’ll confuse h... See more

Taking notes, I’ve come to realize, is a form of collecting. I’ve never been interested in collecting physical things, but when it comes to beautiful literary quotes, I have thousands of notebook entries.

Physical or digital, I think whatever system gets you to look forward to consistently reviewing what you’ve collected (read: forgotten) is the best system.

“The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.” — Goethe

“For every good idea that comes out of you, you need ten good ideas coming into you. And that’s up to you to ensure that you continuously fill yourself up with fresh knowledge and information and impressions so that one thing can come out.” — René Redzepi