Throw It Against the Wall . . . Pt. 1
When my four daughters were little, my sister was the “naughty aunt.” When they spent time with their cousins, we never quite knew what we would find when we came to pick them up. Kathy made sure that all four of her nieces had an adventure while they were with her!
You have likely heard the old adage, “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.” One evening, as we arrived to pick up our girls from my sister’s house, we were surprised to find spaghetti on her dining room wall, on the floor and on the ceiling. “Daddy, Mommy, guess what Aunt Kathy let us do!”
“I can see,” I said, as I looked from their smiling faces to my sister’s gloating face. She quite literally had let them take up the challenge to see how much spaghetti would stick!
The Information Swarm
Generally, our brains work like that. Especially in this age of information. Hourly, daily, monthly and annually, gigabytes to zettabytes of information swarm at us individually and across the world in milliseconds. We all struggle to manage it, to learn from it, to use it. But not all information is equal. Not all information sticks, and what sticks is not always the best information. In the midst of conspiracy theories, false information, truth, reason, entertainment, mistrust, fact checking, Artificial Intelligence, etc. our world is much like the tangled strands of spaghetti. And it requires us to answer some questions for ourselves:
- How do we integrate wisdom so we can learn from others?
- How do we avoid the pitfalls of misinformation?
- How do we manage our personal knowledge to create thoughtful synergy?
- How do we get our information out to others?
How Do We Integrate Wisdom?
These four questions will be explored in a few articles, beginning with this first question. Each question builds on the knowledge explored in the previous question, and will hopefully provide a framework for assisting your knowledge integration, thinking/notetaking, writing and other creative and learning pursuits.
This is the way I integrate and synthesize information, and my hope is that my methodology will stimulate some thought as you form your own unique thinking methodology. It’s the principles we develop that matter most. We can learn from others, we can synthesize their teaching, but we can’t duplicate their processes exactly. We must develop the method that works best for us. To demonstrate this process, I will show you how this series of articles began to develop, as I spent some time engaged with information throughout my day.
First, I Gather Information That Resonates
I write my thoughts throughout the day. I read. I listen to music. I meditate on an image that is meaningful to me. I take pictures to capture a moment, and collect these moments on a weekly basis. The information that resonates in the moment may be realistic, speculative, moving, off-kilter, it doesn’t matter. I collect it. I can verify it later. I can discard it, or determine that it’s not reasonable.
My wife, Virginia, used to like to watch Ancient Aliens, and other similar shows. Not because she believed what they were sharing, and not for entertainment purposes only, but because sometimes there were little nuggets of historical information buried within all the conjecture.
And would I laugh as she watched these shows. A common phrase I heard in this genre of televsion was, “Is it possible that . . .” and I would always comment as my wife watched, “Anything is possible, but is it probable?” Generally, as I gather information, I don’t ask that question, something in the information resonated with me. But before I go further with that information, to determine if it is useful to me, ask this question, and follow the principle of Occam’s Razor — when there is all kinds of competing information, generally (but not always), the simplest explanation is preferred (if it matches the observable data available to us). So, I don’t believe that NASA has a secret base filled with enslaved children on Mars.
Now that doesn’t mean that such information may be invaluable to me. It may be useful to develop as an example for something I’m working on. It may help me generate some new ideas. It may cause me to ask simple but deep questions like, “Why are some humans prone to believe information like this?”
Or, I may decide that after looking it over, this information, I don’t want to put the effort required to go down this rabbit hole.
I ask these same questions of my beliefs. I am a person of faith, so I hold some beliefs that are resonable to me, yet they may not be reasonable to others. By acknowleding that, I can be gracious in my interactions with others, without expectation that I must force my beliefs on them, yet remain discerning when I see real idiocracy at play. I gather what resonates knowing that we are taught by life.
An Idea That Resonated
Now this isn’t an original idea, I’m sure if I searched, I could find someone who has shared those exact words, but it is a synthesis of an idea, started as a little “spark” when I read a piece from The Writing Cooperative written by morganeua. The article’s title & subtitle was as follows: 4 Steps to Effective Knowledge Management: How to Take Notes for Nonfiction Writing: Transform your research and writing workflow with a “zettelkasten”.
Now I do a lot of reading on theories of notetaking, including the Zettelkasten methodology, but this one popped up in my Medium feed in a moment of digital synchronicity, and this jumped out at me:
We are not only taught by lecturers in university, or writers on Medium. We are also taught by books and films and experiences and failures and friends and feelings and nature.
I paused to meditate on this quote. Churning the ideas over in my mind, comparing it to my experience, writing a few notes that led to this article, and sharing it in a tweet with my summary of the main idea: We are taught by life.
Generally, this would reside in my primary capture tool, Twos, for a bit, but this thought snowballed with other ideas I was focusing on today, and I began to build mental connections, form an outline for an article, then as I started writing my notes, connecting with other ideas, while realizing that this would need to become a series.
Second, Process Your Gathered Information
You can’t process information exactly the same way others do. You can learn from the teachers out there like Tiago Forte, Ali Abdaal, Nick Milo and many others (some whom I now count as virtual friends), but I suspect that most of them would agree, you must process information through the lens of your experiences, metabolize the information for the needs in your life, spitting out information that you may find toxic to your soul.
Where did this idea come from for today’s “spaghetti article”? I was reviewing some items that I had posted on Twitter. Often, as I’m reviewing my Readwise highlights for the day, I post one or two on Twitter. A recent one struck me as integrating well with my theme of the day, as I spent some time in thought.
If you do not metabolize your life well through reflectively digesting the “facts” of what has happened to you, even nourishing events can become toxic. — Allison Fallon, The Power of Writing it Down
I read Allison’s book several months ago, highlighted (sparingly) some key quotes, and I have been internally “munching” on them for several months. I review them in Readwise, I write my thoughts on them in Twos, I summarize them until I have a solid, original, kernal of truth that integrates the idea into my life, my thinking, my writing, and hopefully becomes an inspiration to others I engage with (in person and through my writing).
This information processing empowers me. It transforms my world, and it inspires me to influence my little spot on this planet with thoughts that will encourage others, help them engage their gifts, and lead them to explore their own ideas a little further. Stay tuned for more in the upcoming days.
I’m John. I write to transform and influence. That makes me a vision-caster, and I do most of my visioning in a little app called ✌️Twos which is where my sparks of inspiration reside. You can find out more here and get a free premium upgrade by following my link.
I’m on Twitter at johnataylor and many other socials as well. Feel free to reach out, my DMs are always open.
