Revisiting Ideas
Sam Altman's Method for Clear Thinking
youtube.comPermission to collect without clarity
Sometimes Scripture or a random quote lights up your soul and you don’t know why. That’s okay. Your future self — wiser, more experienced, holding new puzzle pieces — will know.
Think of it as sowing seed.
Some seed looks pointless until the season shifts.
But there is much to learn from what we think we already know. Each time we revisit material, we discover new meaning in it. We are not the same person who first encountered it, so we see it from a new lens.
Salman @ Quick Brown Fox • 🦊 Repetition as Ritual
Return to what you wrote.
Each revisit adds a new layer.
Old thoughts + new you = fresh insight.
Now, the spark file itself is not all that unusual: that's why Moleskins or Evernote are so useful to so many people. But the key habit that I've tried to cultivate is this: every three or four months, I go back and re-read the entire spark file. And it's not an inconsequential document: it's almost fifty pages of hunches at this point, the length... See more
Steven Johnson • The Spark File
Write it down
"Most good material is forgotten. Write down the funniest or most interesting thing that happens to you each day. Most days will be boring, but if you write something each day, then you'll have 5 to 10 entertaining stories within a year or two. People are sitting on more funny stories than they realize because they do not have a habit
The Toolbox Principle
A toolbox isn’t fancy. It’s not color-coded or AI-tagged.
It’s just one safe place you always return to.
If you always put your hammer in the same box, you never have to remember where it went. When life gets messy or search fails, you still know: open the toolbox.
That’s what Steven Johnson’s spark file is — not the flashiest
... See more