The journey to thecompendium.cards

Evolving a bespoke medium for developing nuggets of insight

This post is part one of a two-part story about https://thecompendium.cards . This post covers the long-winded motivation and journey to the concept, whereas How to use thecompendium.cards covers a more practical guide on how best to engage with it.

The power of thinking by talking

I seek out as much interesting information as I can absorb — people with different perspectives and experiences, interesting books or articles— to grow my intuition by giving it more patterns to match against and more ways to make sense of those patterns. But intuition doesn’t count for that much because it’s fuzzy and hard to get a handle on, both within your own mind but especially for communicating that knowledge to others.

Distilling intuition into words is a great way to discover what your accumulated intuition is telling you, in a way that can then be shared with others. Often, the effort of distilling it to words reveals a clarity that was missing when it was just a fuzzy feeling in your head, making it easier to apply to real situations and easier to find additional connections.

It’s one of the reasons I like talking in a collaborative debate environment so much, but also why I like writing. As I pull on the threads of intuition to fix them into words, I invariably stumble across additional nuggets of potential insight as I realize a connection to something else. Developing insights is a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, a spiraling, circuitous, but deeply satisfying journey.

The tyranny of the medium post

Any kind of written post — especially moderately long ones — need to be polished, represent ideas that won’t change much in the future, and stand on their own (or rest on foundations already laid earlier). For the last few years I’ve been collecting threads I wanted to pull on in posts on Medium as a series of drafts. But every time I sat down to work on one, as I pulled on the thread by writing and distilling thoughts, I’d discover deeper, more foundational insights that felt like they had to be dug into first.

The result was that writing a post was overwhelming and never ending. That made it hard to motivate myself — every time I sat down to work on one draft it would unspool into an overwhelming mess or make me realize I really needed to work on another draft first. Meanwhile the threads I wanted to pull on kept accumulating into an embarrassing backlog of literally hundreds of post drafts, collecting dust and slowly accreting into something illegible even to me. The prospect of wading into that quagmire made it even harder than before to get myself motivated to sit down and write.

The practical pattern of an inter-linked FAQ

A pattern that I had developed for presenting strategic arguments in a work context is the inter-linked FAQ at the end of a slide deck. You want to keep the main thrust of the argument lean, succinct, and easy-to-follow. But you also want to be able to anticipate and counter potential critiques before they derail someone’s understanding of the argument. The problem is that every reader will have a different set of potentially existential critiques, and trying to address all of them in the main thrust of the argument makes it unwieldy, harder to grok for all readers, and exposes more surface area for disagreement.

The pattern I’ve found that works best is to keep the main thrust of the argument convincing to the 80th percentile reader. Then, wherever in the argument a potential critique emerges (some of which you will find via comments and feedback as you share it), instead of addressing it in the main flow of the argument, link to an FAQ slide addressing that critique in the appendix. That way the small number of people who have that particular critique can be quickly satisfied before their question derails them, but most readers will whiz on past. Google Slides also makes it possible to link to a specific slide, even if it moves around, which makes this pattern easy to implement.

This pattern works extremely well in practice, but over time it evolved and took on a life of its own. I found that some FAQ slides needed to make sub-assertions, and those assertions in turn would generally be accepted by most readers, but some readers might disagree. The answer, of course, was to link those sub-assertions to still other FAQ slides, in a kind of choose-your-own-adventure tree where each reader could go only as deep into the argument as they needed to be convinced.

Embracing the interlinked web of insights

About a year ago it occurred to me that this pattern was not only useful to make an adaptively-convincing argument, but also could be used to develop a whole web of ideas even outside of the context of a specific argument. It could allow me to incrementally accrete new ideas and then link them to deeper insights or supporting arguments as required. That could solve both the motivational gridlock that came from developing too-big pieces of content, as well as the fact that developing content consistently unlocked more foundational insights.

I created a Google Slides presentation and started creating a slide for each nugget of insight in my mediums draft folder, inter-linking between them as I went. I left the slide deck open to the public just in case some motivated and adventurous souls wanted to peek into the dizzying spiral that is my thoughts as they develop.

The format was a revelation: I found that my momentum was unlocked to a much greater degree than I had anticipated. It made it possible to incrementally invest effort into developing and sharpening the body of insight and made writing go from being a chore I had to psyche myself up for into something I could dive into any time I had 30 minutes or more to spare. The hundred or so starter cards quickly ballooned into multiple hundreds with the increased motivation. Every time I had more content for an idea than could fit on a single slide, that implied I should create additional sub-slides and link to those in an ever-deeper tree.

I started creating a complex web of App Scripts to help manage the ballooning slide deck, including automatic back-reference links, automatic summaries of recent changes, and a primitive tagging system based on magic words in speaker notes. It quickly grew unwieldy and hard to maintain, and Google Slides itself started to chug under the weight of hundreds and hundreds of slides.

From slides to cards

I decided that given the momentum I felt, maybe this format was worth investing more into, including building customized tooling.

I was using slides, but these nuggets weren’t actually slides. They were more like individual insights, where the need for a short, punchy, title and a strict limit on space for content forced them to be bite-size and have sub-insights factored out into a tree. They reminded me of virtual index cards of content. The title of the card is the primary insight, and the body of the card is the underlying reasoning, with sub-assertions linking to other cards, so any reader can follow the chain of logic as deep down the rabbit hole as they care to go.

Although I’d never used it myself, I became aware of the venerable HyperCard and how powerful it had been. (Fun fact: the original Myst was literally implemented as a HyperCard stack.) These insights, forced into interlinked bite-size chunks, felt like convergent evolution towards a thing HyperCard had done years ago, almost like an internet-age spiritual successor to a lost way of organizing ideas from the earliest days of personal computers.

The fact that interlinked cards had been so successful in the past made me realize it might be worth it to develop a bespoke card CMS to power this collection. It took a little bit of effort to get to a minimally-useful tool, but from there it was intoxicating to continue adding more and more functionality to make it easier to browse, consume, author, and curate these cards — to the point where working on the CMS was sometimes more enticing than working on the content itself.

Although I find this new approach to be enormously freeing, I don’t think it fully replaces the power of a self-contained Medium post, and I plan to continue posting them. But the swirling primordial soup of developing insights will be mostly captured in those cards, with the Medium posts coming only later (and likely less often, since the cards take some of the pressure off).

Onwards

That’s the journey to the concept of https://thecompendium.cards. For more on how to practically engage with this new collection of cards, see the next post, How to use thecompendium.cards.