how to have, and what to do with, ideas

For instance, Tschaikovsky wrote, “The germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready . . .” And Mary Shelley: “Invention does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” And Stephen Spender: “There is nothing we imagine which we do not already know. And our ability to imagine is our ability to... See more

Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow

I don’t remember everything I read. But I do believe memory is an obligation, as St. Augustine encourages us, for the imagination is composed of the things we remember—books, art, liturgy, life experiences.

Reading up to 2024

In his 2012 essay, “More people should write,” writer and programmer James Somers described this process as creating a mental bucket for an idea, thereby unleashing a magnetic force between that idea and the world:

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a

What every man is born an heir to is an inheritance of human achievement; an inheritance of feelings, emotions, images, visions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, understandings, intellectual and practical enterprises, languages, relationships, organizations, religions, canons and maxims of conduct, procedures, rituals, skills, works of art, books, musical

For him [Feynman] satisfaction in discovery was there even if what you discover was already known by others. It was there even if all you are doing is re-deriving someone else’s result your own way. And it was there even if your creativity is in playing with your child. It was self-satisfaction. Feynman’s focus was internal, and his internal focus... See more

Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow

The aspect of Scott Buchanan’s life to which this memoir relates began, for me at least, with a college lecture he gave in October of 1944.

The lecture was a flight of high speculative fancy in which he tried to imagine the features of a Republic of Learning joined with a political republic.

If man is a political animal, his virtues compromised and

Ideas often start out like little toys, something that we push around and take apart to figure something out about how it works — or how it should work. Playing is thinking even if it doesn’t always look like it.

Preludes

A big part of passive learning is going out of your way to read and learn from the widest variety of topics you can, intentionally looking for similarities between different fields. When you do, you’ll be stunned at how easy and fun it is to stumble on a new idea that teaches you how the world works.

Collaborative Fund • Active vs. Passive Learning

‘He’ being Scott Buchanan