238: Sketch Your Mind by Zsolt Viczian

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1. 00:00:00 All right, Mike, let's talk about a book.
2. 00:00:03 Let's talk about a visual book.
3. 00:00:05 Let's talk about a book with a bunch of pictures in it.
4. 00:00:07 Are you ready?
5. 00:00:08 This could be the worst audio podcast ever.
6. 00:00:12 But you know, I thought that too.
7. 00:00:15 But before we go there, we need to talk about follow-up.
8. 00:00:20 So would you like me to go first or do you want to hit your follow-up?
9. 00:00:23 First doesn't matter first.
10. 00:00:24 That's cool. OK, I'm supposed to talk to Katie about crafting commerce.
11. 00:00:28 I didn't do this. Come on.
12. 00:00:29 I know. I totally forgot.
13. 00:00:31 I'm really sorry.
14. 00:00:32 I'll put it into my to-do list and I'll actually remember to do it next time.
15. 00:00:35 OK, I had to think about transitions between characters and roles.
16. 00:00:39 I think one of the ones that I thought of was really utilizing.
17. 00:00:44 I think I brought it up on the on the last episode is really utilizing that that
18. 00:00:47 car time well and being more intentional about that car time and not just thrown
19. 00:00:53 in a podcast and just kind of veg it out or thrown in an audio book and just
20. 00:00:55 veg it out but actually like debriefing and processing in that car time.
21. 00:01:00 So to help me switch through those characters and those roles, I can tell you
22. 00:01:04 that there's another time that I have to think more about and I wasn't able to
23. 00:01:09 figure out a good routine for this one and that's me.
24. 00:01:13 So I get up early and I work early in the morning and then the boys come down
25. 00:01:18 and they can all they all have like a light or whatever and they can come down
26. 00:01:20 at the same time. Well, they all basically flood down when when it's their wake up
27. 00:01:25 time and the transition between like me thinking hard and working and then them
28. 00:01:30 just like piling on. Yeah, I got to figure that one out because I'm just not
29. 00:01:35 as good at like I need to give myself 10 minutes or five minutes or whatever
30. 00:01:38 to figure out a way to transition that better.
31. 00:01:40 So that is one that I need to to work on better plan the Sunday six ish with Katie.
32. 00:01:46 We have not had time to even remotely think about this.
33. 00:01:49 So I have not had a chance to even address this one.
34. 00:01:53 Big failure. It's a gigantic red X and then what does one spin cycle look like?
35. 00:01:59 Again, did not have time to look at this.
36. 00:02:02 There's a reason why I'm going to I'm going to like try to defend myself here
37. 00:02:05 for a second. There's a reason why Mike that I didn't have time to do any of this
38. 00:02:09 or I didn't take the time to do any of this.
39. 00:02:10 I hope to explain it to you during the rest of this episode.
40. 00:02:14 But there is a valid reason why I'm so bad on my follow up items this week.
41. 00:02:20 So like what are your what about you? What are your follow up items?
42. 00:02:25 I also am bad at my follow up items.
43. 00:02:27 I was bad at being productive in general over the last couple of weeks.
44. 00:02:31 I'm going to blame my Black Friday Cyber Monday sale because I ended up saying
45. 00:02:36 like 12 emails, but I put a ton of work into it.
46. 00:02:40 So people didn't receive 12 emails and I created like five different offers,
47. 00:02:45 but they only got the one that was appropriate for them.
48. 00:02:50 It's a bit of kit automation magic that I pulled off over this last weekend.
49. 00:02:56 But it took a lot of work and a lot of testing because I really didn't want to mess it up.
50. 00:03:02 So that being said, my pre post work routines, this one is in progress.
51. 00:03:09 My vision for this is that I really have a solid
52. 00:03:15 shutdown routine where I close the door to the office and I don't think about work
53. 00:03:21 anymore the rest of the day.
54. 00:03:23 That hasn't happened yet because I am still trying to figure out how a new app fits
55. 00:03:30 into this potentially. OK, I've been messing around with an app called Lazy, Lazy.S.O.
56. 00:03:37 And it's sort of like a.
57. 00:03:40 I think it will feel like Cal Newport talks about the working memory.txt.
58. 00:03:45 It's sort of like a scratch pad for things.
59. 00:03:49 You can kind of go crazy with it and use it as
60. 00:03:53 a note-taking app and do tasks and journaling and all that kind of stuff in there.
61. 00:03:57 That's not how I'm envisioning using it.
62. 00:03:59 I'm envisioning using it with a quick keyboard shortcut to just jot something down
63. 00:04:03 the top of mind and then I have the today's note basically there and I process all
64. 00:04:11 that stuff before the day is over and I just haven't built up the muscle memory yet
65. 00:04:17 of putting the things in there.
66. 00:04:19 So by the time the end of the day comes and I look at it and I'm like, Oh, there's
67. 00:04:22 nothing in here.
68. 00:04:25 So I think this is going to long term be a fit, but
69. 00:04:30 I have to pay more attention to it and be serious about it basically.
70. 00:04:35 Got it.
71. 00:04:35 Got it.
72. 00:04:36 Makes sense.
73. 00:04:36 I guess that kind of ties in with rethink my transitions as well, although that was
74. 00:04:40 a broader one.
75. 00:04:43 I don't really.
76. 00:04:45 Yeah, I didn't really make a whole lot of progress on
77. 00:04:47 on this one.
78. 00:04:48 One of the things that I want to do with transitions is I want to start going to
79. 00:04:54 the coworking space more often because there's a 15 minute car right on the way
80. 00:04:58 and a 15 minute car to the way back that is beautiful for my transitions and
81. 00:05:04 creating boundaries for how many hours I work because I am more productive when
82. 00:05:07 I am there and I don't have the distractions and I can't just go do
83. 00:05:10 something else.
84. 00:05:11 The problem for me has been that I'm in the middle of the greater business
85. 00:05:15 accelerator and I have those live sessions and I end up doing those a couple
86. 00:05:19 times a week.
87. 00:05:20 So I can't do those from my shared office.
88. 00:05:23 I probably could if I really wanted to.
89. 00:05:25 I don't want to though. This is where my command central is right here in my
90. 00:05:30 home office like this is the place I'm most comfortable doing that and because
91. 00:05:35 I have a couple of those Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the middle of the day.
92. 00:05:40 And then focus gets recorded on Tuesdays.
93. 00:05:43 I have not been able to make it down to the coworking space.
94. 00:05:47 I think I was there for a couple of hours once this week and that was that was it.
95. 00:05:53 So more progress to be made there, set boundaries for how many hours I work.
96. 00:05:58 The boundaries have basically been the kids have stuff.
97. 00:06:02 So I have to be done working today, for example, by 4 p.m.
98. 00:06:06 Because I have to take them to an indoor soccer game.
99. 00:06:10 That's probably not great for boundaries.
100. 00:06:14 I should establish some better boundaries, but that is where we're at.
101. 00:06:17 So I think he could give me a big red X on that one.
102. 00:06:20 I understood it. It was it was not a good week for follow-up items.
103. 00:06:25 But then I can't remember when we recorded the last episode.
104. 00:06:28 Was that before Thanksgiving right before during Thanksgiving?
105. 00:06:32 I don't remember holidays.
106. 00:06:34 Oh, it was. Yeah, because you were in Door County.
107. 00:06:37 Yeah. So so it was definitely during it was definitely during holidays.
108. 00:06:40 So all right, we'll be better at follow-up items next time, maybe radically.
109. 00:06:46 Yeah, in theory, in theory, we will.
110. 00:06:48 Let's talk about today's book. Today's book is called Sketch Your Mind.
111. 00:06:53 Nurture, a playful and creative brain.
112. 00:06:55 It's by Jolt Viction.
113. 00:06:58 Is that how you say his name?
114. 00:06:59 That is. And you know how I know that is because I have watched a lot of his YouTube
115. 00:07:03 videos, OK, a lot of his YouTube videos in the last two weeks.
116. 00:07:07 This is partially why my follow-up items did not get done very well.
117. 00:07:11 Because I thought to myself, you know, I'm going through this book.
118. 00:07:15 Oh, sorry.
119. 00:07:16 But look at you. You got me all distracted and you got me all on a tangent.
120. 00:07:21 First, sketch your mind.
121. 00:07:22 It's about visual thinking and it's about how do we take visual thinking and kind
122. 00:07:29 of combine it with Zetlkasten and mind maps and concept maps and all of these
123. 00:07:35 things. So I'm super jazzed to hear you talk about how he describes mind maps
124. 00:07:42 and concept maps because you are the mind map guy.
125. 00:07:45 You make mind maps for every one of the books that we do, right?
126. 00:07:48 So I'm excited to hear you say that.
127. 00:07:50 But before we get there, see, look, you got me off on such a tangent man.
128. 00:07:55 All right, we've got 11 chapters.
129. 00:07:58 So we've got 11 chapters, you've got a manifesto at the beginning.
130. 00:08:00 We've got a kind of a little side thing.
131. 00:08:03 We've got an epilogue.
132. 00:08:04 What I think is the most interesting part about the general nature of this book is
133. 00:08:09 he wrote it in like six weeks.
134. 00:08:10 He like did a challenge on his visual thinking YouTube channel and he's like,
135. 00:08:15 see if I can write a book in six weeks.
136. 00:08:16 And it was like prior to I think a visual thinking conference that they were
137. 00:08:20 putting on and he had this insane turnaround and then he's it was the PKM
138. 00:08:24 summit, which is I believe in the Netherlands.
139. 00:08:27 There you go.
140. 00:08:28 If it wasn't in the Netherlands, I would totally be there.
141. 00:08:31 I've seen people share about this on social media the last couple of years.
142. 00:08:34 I'm like, I really want to go.
143. 00:08:35 I really don't want to lie to the Netherlands.
144. 00:08:39 Oh, I've heard the Netherlands is awesome.
145. 00:08:41 So, yeah, I mean, if you if you need to.
146. 00:08:43 Just international travel, not, not my thing.
147. 00:08:47 Yeah, I got it.
148. 00:08:48 I got it.
149. 00:08:49 So I think it's wild, though, that he wrote this in six weeks.
150. 00:08:52 I do think there are things you can tell, you know, that were that were written
151. 00:08:57 in six weeks, I think the other thing that's important to mention at the front
152. 00:08:59 of this book is he talks at the end of the book about how he used AI a lot to
153. 00:09:06 help him with the writing of this book.
154. 00:09:08 And I love that he tells us that.
155. 00:09:10 I love that he's like, hey, I'm engaging with AI as I write the book.
156. 00:09:14 And by no means that he say AI, write me an 11 chapter book on visual thinking
157. 00:09:19 and blah, blah, blah, blah.
158. 00:09:20 He was like it almost sounded when he was describing it like it was a conversation
159. 00:09:24 partner that he had this conversation partner and he was using it.
160. 00:09:27 And it was just really cool to see a product produced that you know the the
161. 00:09:32 author used AI thoroughly with that.
162. 00:09:36 So I thought that was pretty neat.
163. 00:09:38 I was pretty excited about that.
164. 00:09:40 Anything general you want to talk about with the book?
165. 00:09:43 Well, the fact that he wrote it in six weeks reminded me of another action item
166. 00:09:48 I should report on when I was going to write a book in in November.
167. 00:09:54 I made good progress on that, by the way.
168. 00:09:56 But I decided that I'm not going to write this book yet.
169. 00:10:02 What I'm going to do instead is work with
170. 00:10:06 the signature framework person to dial that in before I publish it in a book.
171. 00:10:12 OK, OK, I had a call yesterday with her.
172. 00:10:16 Her name is Charlotte and it went really well.
173. 00:10:20 And kind of as I'm talking through things as mentioning, you know, I'm planning on
174. 00:10:25 doing this this book, but I, you know, I'm not I figure, you know, if I'm going to
175. 00:10:32 write this book, I should probably have some sort of visual to attach to it.
176. 00:10:36 And just through the whole process, we figured out that the PKM stack is really
177. 00:10:42 the thing that is like my signature framework.
178. 00:10:45 So that's the one that has to be done first.
179. 00:10:47 And then like whatever else I'm going to talk about has to tie into that.
180. 00:10:53 God, and the PKM stack, like it's there.
181. 00:10:56 I use it, but I don't think it's real effective.
182. 00:10:58 So going to work on that, then come back to to the book.
183. 00:11:02 But I think I ended up writing maybe 15,000, 20,000 words total.
184. 00:11:06 Like it wasn't it wasn't nothing, but I kind of lost a little bit of momentum.
185. 00:11:12 And I couldn't really figure out why until I had that call with Charlotte.
186. 00:11:15 And it's like, yeah, this is it.
187. 00:11:16 Yeah. Well, and that that's good.
188. 00:11:18 I mean, that's a that's a quarter issue of the book, right?
189. 00:11:21 Quarter to a third of the book, which most are I think what they say is like 60,000
190. 00:11:25 to 80,000 words is most nonfiction type books.
191. 00:11:30 So getting back to the question you asked me about the visual thinking and all
192. 00:11:37 that kind of stuff, I really like that whole premise.
193. 00:11:41 You referred to me as the mind map guy.
194. 00:11:43 I'm not sure I've earned that title.
195. 00:11:46 However, I will say I do have a much more strict definition of mind mapping than he
196. 00:11:52 does in this book issue.
197. 00:11:53 This book is interesting.
198. 00:11:55 It combines a whole bunch of different concepts, put some under a label of
199. 00:11:59 visual Zettelkosten, which makes me extremely uncomfortable.
200. 00:12:04 But I think there's some really good stuff in here and I'm kind of curious to see
201. 00:12:07 where this conversation goes.
202. 00:12:09 Why does it make you uncomfortable?
203. 00:12:11 I'm really intrigued at why that makes you uncomfortable.
204. 00:12:13 Well, because Zettelkosten has never really clicked for me.
205. 00:12:17 Like there's a lot of stuff in a system for writing by Bob Dotto,
206. 00:12:21 which I really like and I've kind of morphed my own system for creating things.
207. 00:12:27 Yeah, and you could make the argument that I do a form of Zettelkosten.
208. 00:12:32 Zettelkosten purist would be like, no way that what you do is actually Zettelkosten
209. 00:12:36 because you don't do XYZ.
210. 00:12:38 And that's kind of the way I feel about mind mapping is he describes it here.
211. 00:12:42 He's like, yeah, mind map, just a couple steps.
212. 00:12:44 No, there's so much more to it.
213. 00:12:47 I'm not going to go Tony Busan on you and really say what you're doing is
214. 00:12:52 completely wrong, but I feel like it's an oversimplification of these things.
215. 00:12:55 And then it combines together into a package, which I have fallen on my face,
216. 00:13:01 trying to apply over and over and over again.
217. 00:13:03 So I feel like the whole idea behind sketching your mind or trying to play a
218. 00:13:08 playful and create a brain, that should be like catnip to me.
219. 00:13:12 And I found myself resisting a lot of this stuff.
220. 00:13:16 That's in the book, the way he describes it.
221. 00:13:18 But that's probably just me.
222. 00:13:21 And like I said, I do think there's a lot of great stuff in here.
223. 00:13:24 So I'm kind of curious to see where this conversation goes.
224. 00:13:27 OK, so the first two things I want to talk about before we get to chapter one is
225. 00:13:32 introduction, and I think the best way for us to do this book is just go chapter by
226. 00:13:36 chapter before we get there, though, I want to describe how he unpacks the book.
227. 00:13:41 So there's visuals all through this book.
228. 00:13:43 So early in the book, he gives us a visual diagram of the way the book flows.
229. 00:13:50 And in this visual diagram, chapter one stands alone.
230. 00:13:53 Then there's two, three, four, and five that flow through there.
231. 00:13:57 And he calls this the Foundations of Visual Thinking.
232. 00:14:00 Then there's six, seven, and eight, which are the navigation and emergence.
233. 00:14:03 Then there's nine and ten inches building through loops.
234. 00:14:06 And then eleven is basically the go get them, you know, go get them.
235. 00:14:10 Tiger, you know, go use this stuff and unleash the genie is the way he describes it.
236. 00:14:14 So there's that, but before he even does that, he has a manifesto.
237. 00:14:19 So knowledge is meant to be seen, shaped and set free.
238. 00:14:24 Ideas deserve to be seen, text and visuals are equal partners.
239. 00:14:27 Stop filing, start thinking.
240. 00:14:30 He's got this idea that unpacks all the stuff he's going to unpack in the rest of the book.
241. 00:14:35 And again, he has it as a visual.
242. 00:14:38 A visual for us, right?
243. 00:14:40 So there's this picture of this this visual nature, this visual manifesto.
244. 00:14:44 I like the way he does this in terms of prepping us for the next eleven chapters
245. 00:14:50 and saying like, here we go, we're going to get started.
246. 00:14:52 Here are all the things I'm going to talk about.
247. 00:14:53 I thought it was an engaging way to do that.
248. 00:14:56 You're smirking.
249. 00:14:57 I would love to know why you're smirking and what you're smirking about.
250. 00:15:00 Yeah, I think you're you're probably right.
251. 00:15:05 I don't know, I just am jumping to the end in my mind, I guess.
252. 00:15:11 Yeah, like the whole the whole idea of 40s that will cost and is one that I really
253. 00:15:16 want to unpack, but we're not not quite there yet.
254. 00:15:18 So I'll hold the powder on that one.
255. 00:15:20 OK, all right.
256. 00:15:21 So you just want to hold until we get the chapter one, which we're going to do right now.
257. 00:15:25 OK, chapter one, a new paradigm for thinking.
258. 00:15:27 So in chapter one, his goal is to introduce this idea for the PKM for the thinking.
259. 00:15:36 And he starts it off by thinking we think in spirals.
260. 00:15:39 We don't think in circles, which is why we get frustrated with with thinking.
261. 00:15:44 One D PKM, he says, is sequential one word at a time.
262. 00:15:48 It relies on memory to D.
263. 00:15:49 This is like the he calls out the para method.
264. 00:15:52 OK, from Tiago forte, is that right?
265. 00:15:55 Yep. OK, so the para method, which is I can't even remember what it is.
266. 00:16:00 Resources, areas, projects, projects, yeah. OK, so then he says that relies on memory.
267. 00:16:07 Then you have 3D, which is interconnected notes, maps of content, graph views.
268. 00:16:12 Then you have 4D.
269. 00:16:13 And this is what we this is where he's hitting.
270. 00:16:15 He's starting us off 40 spatial structure and seeing our notes.
271. 00:16:19 So essentially making a visual of all of our notes and then making a visual of the
272. 00:16:24 connection between those notes.
273. 00:16:26 So it's taking 3D and it's amping it up and making sketches for everything.
274. 00:16:32 His whole goal is something I think, Mike, you've talked about this, right?
275. 00:16:37 The map is not the compass kind of thing, you know, or the map is not the territory.
276. 00:16:41 Yeah, right.
277. 00:16:42 So you get this idea as he said, most of our note-taking systems are meant for archiving.
278. 00:16:46 Sorry, most of our text-based note-taking systems are meant for archiving.
279. 00:16:50 He thinks we need to make a structured map and we need to have this developed as a map
280. 00:16:55 to work us through visually through this.
281. 00:16:58 I don't really have a like strong opinion on this idea.
282. 00:17:03 I don't really care about the 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D.
283. 00:17:06 I think the premise behind thinking more visually is good.
284. 00:17:10 I like that.
285. 00:17:11 That resonates with me.
286. 00:17:12 Chapter 1 lands.
287. 00:17:14 Go ahead, Mikey.
288. 00:17:16 Yeah.
289. 00:17:17 So the 40 PKM idea, I agree with it in theory, but it never sat well with me
290. 00:17:26 throughout the book and I really didn't figure out why until until the end.
291. 00:17:34 I think it's because he's got a very specific way that he's recommending you
292. 00:17:39 integrate those visuals to see how the ideas fit together, which on the one hand,
293. 00:17:45 I don't blame him for taking that approach.
294. 00:17:50 You got to give people something.
295. 00:17:52 Otherwise, they're just going to be like, oh, this is too conceptual.
296. 00:17:55 I don't know how to actually do this.
297. 00:17:56 So I think actually for someone coming new to this idea,
298. 00:18:02 probably the the method that he shares about, you know, one side is the picture,
299. 00:18:06 the other side is the text and then mapping things out on the canvas.
300. 00:18:09 Like you mentioned with like the different directions and what those mean.
301. 00:18:13 That's actually probably pretty good advice.
302. 00:18:15 But having made thousands of mind maps at this point,
303. 00:18:22 it's a little bit different structure.
304. 00:18:25 And then I've been playing around with canvas and obsidian,
305. 00:18:29 but I don't use it to the extent that he uses it.
306. 00:18:32 So he's definitely the expert when it comes to this.
307. 00:18:36 He knows way more about this than I do.
308. 00:18:38 But my whole experience of sketch notes and mind maps and things like that,
309. 00:18:44 which fit very cleanly under the sketch your mind title.
310. 00:18:49 Don't fit cleanly into the sort of a system that he's describing here.
311. 00:18:56 OK, so I'm left in this weird space.
312. 00:18:59 I mean, personally, it's like, was everything that I've been doing a lie?
313. 00:19:04 Should I be embracing visuals at El Castan or because this is working for me?
314. 00:19:10 Should I continue to do this?
315. 00:19:11 And if you were here, he would probably say, just do what's working for you.
316. 00:19:15 If there was one tiny thing from everything that I share in this book,
317. 00:19:19 that you can apply, then go ahead and do that.
318. 00:19:21 And I do have some action items from this book specifically.
319. 00:19:25 So I think there's jumping to the end, I guess.
320. 00:19:30 I think there's a lot of value in wrestling through this, but I did have to
321. 00:19:33 wrestle through it because it's not a long book.
322. 00:19:37 It's a very visual book.
323. 00:19:38 There's a lot of stories in this book.
324. 00:19:40 So in terms of the number of words that are written, it was hard for me to wrap
325. 00:19:48 my head around it in a way like, what do I actually do with this?
326. 00:19:52 OK, we could not be more different on this, Mike.
327. 00:19:55 This is amazing because I drink this book in like the best tasting beverage
328. 00:20:03 you've ever had in your life, like this book, I mean, we're getting to the end,
329. 00:20:06 but it's like this hits so well with me and so hard with me that I was like, oh,
330. 00:20:10 my gosh, this is this is amazing.
331. 00:20:12 Let's let's take a step back though.
332. 00:20:14 Because you said a thing that I meant to do when I introduced the book.
333. 00:20:16 Do you know what Joel did or does?
334. 00:20:20 Like, do you know Excaladra?
335. 00:20:22 Like, do you know that he is the developer of Excaladra?
336. 00:20:24 Excaladra is essentially I think you might have said this.
337. 00:20:27 It's essentially obsidian canvas on steroids.
338. 00:20:30 Yes, it's just the like crazy amped up version of obsidian canvas.
339. 00:20:35 And he also has Excalabrine, which is very like a version of Excaladra
340. 00:20:40 that lets you flip the cards and follows the exact format he's describing in this book.
341. 00:20:46 Correct.
342. 00:20:47 And and I I never could get a grasp on Excaladra.
343. 00:20:52 Like I always liked it. I liked the idea of it.
344. 00:20:55 I was like, oh, this thing has so much power.
345. 00:20:57 And then I would try to use it and I would just be like, oh, I just don't I don't get it.
346. 00:21:02 Like I can't make it work the way I want it to and whatever it is.
347. 00:21:05 And it wasn't until like he started unpacking things and I don't know what chapter we're going to get to.
348. 00:21:11 And I was like, oh, oh, oh, Excaladra makes total sense to me now.
349. 00:21:19 I completely understand how I would use Excaladra or how I can use Excaladra in the way I I process and in the way I work.
350. 00:21:27 OK, so I just want to make sure everybody knows that the author of this book developed
351. 00:21:32 essentially a program that relies on obsidian that thinks through or that helps you visualize your notes and visualize your visually thinking.
352. 00:21:40 Well, let's go.
353. 00:21:41 Excaladra, I think, does not rely on obsidian, but there's a plugin that brings Excaladra
354. 00:21:49 into obsidian because he has the whole web, the whole web platform, the whole Excaladra web platform.
355. 00:21:54 So you're absolutely right. OK, yeah.
356. 00:21:56 So that's correct.
357. 00:21:58 Are you ready to move on to chapter two in part one?
358. 00:22:01 Yeah, let's talk about Lego.
359. 00:22:02 Yeah.
360. 00:22:02 So chapter two is going to be Lego.
361. 00:22:04 He bundles all of these into the idea of foundations of visual visual thinking.
362. 00:22:08 So chapter two is Lego, chapter three is no three.
363. 00:22:11 Imagine chapter four is visualizing concepts and chapter five is mapping the mind.
364. 00:22:14 Lego, his essential whole point here is just like Lego bricks that we can put
365. 00:22:20 together and then take apart and put together in a new arrangement and take apart and put
366. 00:22:24 together in a new arrangement, we can do the exact same thing with our thinking and
367. 00:22:27 with our notes and with our ideas.
368. 00:22:29 We can put those together in certain ways.
369. 00:22:31 So it gets to the idea of like atomic notes here.
370. 00:22:35 And I don't remember if he says atomic notes in chapter two, but that's essentially what he's
371. 00:22:39 getting to is he saying your Lego pieces, your visuals, are your atomic notes.
372. 00:22:44 So we can put them together in whatever way we want to put them together.
373. 00:22:47 He introduces four visuals here for what he calls playful thinking.
374. 00:22:53 You have your icon, then you have your concept, then you have your integrated
375. 00:22:56 idea board, and then you have your storyboard.
376. 00:22:59 I'm not going to tell you that I fully understand in his mind the difference
377. 00:23:03 between integrated idea board and story board.
378. 00:23:05 But what I will tell you is I've got icon, I've got concept.
379. 00:23:08 I'm going to call concept atomic note.
380. 00:23:10 So I've got icon, I've got atomic note, and then I've got a board that connects
381. 00:23:14 things.
382. 00:23:15 I think this is a cool way to do this.
383. 00:23:18 This makes sense to me.
384. 00:23:19 I think if I was going to back this into a text format, I would say I have my
385. 00:23:26 sentence, I have my group of sentences that tell a concept.
386. 00:23:31 And then I have my paragraph or my map of content or whatever it is that is my
387. 00:23:36 connected ideas together into a more formal writing.
388. 00:23:40 That's the Lego version in the writing world.
389. 00:23:43 But this is basically what he what he's saying.
390. 00:23:45 He has a visual thinking process loop, create, connect, refine, and then repeat.
391. 00:23:49 And he says, we should just do this, do this, do this over and over again.
392. 00:23:52 So that's chapter two.
393. 00:23:53 What do you think?
394. 00:23:53 What do you got out of this one?
395. 00:23:55 Well, I love the idea of the mental lego bricks.
396. 00:24:01 I mean, that is literally what I teach in my practical PKM hybrid cohort
397. 00:24:06 with the whole idea, the ideas level of the PKM stack.
398. 00:24:11 I've got a different process or framework for developing those ideas with with
399. 00:24:15 the creativity flywheel, but we're talking about a lot of the same things here.
400. 00:24:22 So he and I are cut from the same cloth with this.
401. 00:24:25 I love the point that he makes about the structured rules of Lego or what allow
402. 00:24:31 boundless play.
403. 00:24:32 He shared an exercise.
404. 00:24:34 I don't know if this was one that that he did or if it was just one that he was
405. 00:24:38 sharing that other people have done, but the Lego duck exercise, where you've got
406. 00:24:42 the seven bricks and you ask someone to put them together and make a duck, I think
407. 00:24:47 that's a really cool way to get people moving with this sort of thing.
408. 00:24:51 Because a lot of people think, well, I just need the right pieces.
409. 00:24:54 I need more pieces and no, actually, you need less.
410. 00:24:57 You need some constraints around things.
411. 00:24:59 And that's what unlocks things a lot of times.
412. 00:25:02 He talks about how too much freedom can be can be paralyzing.
413. 00:25:06 I like the idea where he talks about the visual notes work better when they're
414. 00:25:10 based on those standard sizes, but I'm not I don't like the idea of just laying out,
415. 00:25:16 you know, one by one, two by two, four by four bricks on a on a canvas.
416. 00:25:21 Maybe I need to try that.
417. 00:25:22 Maybe I need to give it a shot.
418. 00:25:24 But I do really like the idea of building a system of reusable visual elements.
419. 00:25:29 That is exactly what I have done in good notes for my sketch notes.
420. 00:25:33 Yep. So I have so sorry, go ahead.
421. 00:25:36 I just want to I want to affirm what you're saying.
422. 00:25:38 I agree with the one one by one, two by one, two by two.
423. 00:25:42 That doesn't resonate with me.
424. 00:25:43 And I've spent a bunch of hours making visuals at this point.
425. 00:25:46 It doesn't resonate with me either.
426. 00:25:48 That just is too constraining to me.
427. 00:25:50 Sorry. I just wanted to make sure I affirmed that.
428. 00:25:53 The other thing with this with good notes,
429. 00:25:58 like the creating the library of visual elements,
430. 00:26:00 there's triggered a couple of things for me.
431. 00:26:02 When I do sketch notes, I literally have the call to collection and good notes.
432. 00:26:05 Or once I draw one visual element,
433. 00:26:08 I basically save that icon so I can use it again.
434. 00:26:11 About once per sketch note, I will create something new visually,
435. 00:26:17 but otherwise I'm reusing elements that already exist.
436. 00:26:22 And at first, I was like, that's kind of cheating.
437. 00:26:24 But the more I've done it, the more I realize, no,
438. 00:26:27 because I'm still having to go through the same process.
439. 00:26:31 Somebody said this thing, I want to represent this visually.
440. 00:26:34 What am I going to do to represent it visually?
441. 00:26:36 And then I go find the thing and I put it in there.
442. 00:26:38 So I think you kind of get the same result.
443. 00:26:44 But also, I remember going through
444. 00:26:48 I think it was the sketch note workbook by Mike Rode.
445. 00:26:52 He's got two books and I think it was the second one where he has a whole
446. 00:26:56 bunch of space in the back of the book for creating your own icon library
447. 00:27:00 when you're doing sketch notes.
448. 00:27:02 And he's literally like draw the icon for a book, draw the icon for a tree,
449. 00:27:06 draw the icon for pizza, draw the icon for phone.
450. 00:27:10 And then by doing it once you have this
451. 00:27:13 library that you can draw from and you just do it again.
452. 00:27:17 If you're doing an analog with a pen and a piece of paper with good notes,
453. 00:27:21 you can just select it, drop it in, resize it, whatever.
454. 00:27:24 But all of those elements, I feel like there's value in creating them the first time.
455. 00:27:28 Yep, I agree completely in his in his version of this, he he references like
456. 00:27:32 flat icon or your references going to an AI and have it generate the different icons
457. 00:27:37 that you want as a way there is also part of the plug-in part of the Obsidian
458. 00:27:42 Excalibur plug-in is there's a library
459. 00:27:45 resource that you can pull libraries in to have like standard icons.
460. 00:27:49 Now, what I'll tell you about that if you're interested in doing that, it's a lot
461. 00:27:52 of like development from the programming side.
462. 00:27:55 So there's a lot of like customer maps and, you know,
463. 00:27:59 canvases and those type of things.
464. 00:28:01 But there's still some other good stuff there that that I've used.
465. 00:28:04 Mike, you ready to go to chapter three notes?
466. 00:28:07 Reimagine do it.
467. 00:28:09 I think this might be one of the most important chapters of the of the entire book
468. 00:28:14 and because in this chapter, he talks about this idea of hybrid notes and this
469. 00:28:20 idea that you can flip the note over and it's I have the visual on the front end
470. 00:28:25 and I have all the detail on the back end of the back side of the visual on the front
471. 00:28:28 and all the detail on the back side.
472. 00:28:30 This, for me, changed the way I thought
473. 00:28:34 about Zetelkasten and I don't know if that means it removes it from what Zetelkasten
474. 00:28:39 actually is and if it does remove it from what Zetelkasten is, I don't really care.
475. 00:28:43 I'm totally OK with that because he's going to call this visual
476. 00:28:47 Zetelkasten and he's going to have these hybrid notes that have visual on the front
477. 00:28:51 and text on the back, but that allows my brain to condense appropriately on the front
478. 00:29:00 and then have the detail on the back and I don't know why that works so well
479. 00:29:07 with what the way my brain works because I can then see the connections on the high
480. 00:29:12 level and then dig into the deeper stuff if I if I want to.
481. 00:29:16 So he'll make a statement here and he'll say,
482. 00:29:17 "The visual connections first then detailed nuance on the back." Great.
483. 00:29:21 Like I'm totally in.
484. 00:29:22 He has a diagram where he basically shows sketch notes,
485. 00:29:26 traditional documents, digital whiteboards, and then he shows hybrid notes
486. 00:29:30 going across all three of those, like kind of horizontally across.
487. 00:29:34 So the sketch notes, traditional documents, whiteboards are vertical,
488. 00:29:36 hybrid notes go across all three of those and he shows you how a hybrid note
489. 00:29:40 combines all three of those things into into the one.
490. 00:29:43 I think if you don't get this,
491. 00:29:46 I think the rest of his system kind of explodes.
492. 00:29:50 Like it just kind of blows up and he's got videos on it.
493. 00:29:53 These these notes and how to make these notes and why they're valuable.
494. 00:29:57 Now, the challenge I have with it and I know I'm going along here,
495. 00:30:00 but I really think this is the most important chapter of the whole book.
496. 00:30:04 The mechanics of doing this in an app like Obsidian with Excalidra
497. 00:30:10 are not the most straightforward mechanics that have ever existed in the world.
498. 00:30:15 It took me a little while to figure out like, oh,
499. 00:30:18 this is actually how you would do this and this is the workflow.
500. 00:30:22 And this is how you do it and then you don't like mess yourself up.
501. 00:30:25 So I can't imagine trying to do this in something that isn't
502. 00:30:30 an actual piece of paper that I can turn over.
503. 00:30:34 So like you think about it in good notes, like I would have you can't really do
504. 00:30:37 this in good notes, you can't flip the page over in good notes.
505. 00:30:39 You can just have another page that's like right after it.
506. 00:30:43 I don't know how you do this in something that's not Excalidra or not an actual piece
507. 00:30:48 of paper, but I love the idea.
508. 00:30:50 Like I think I think the idea unlocked a lot of stuff for me in my head.
509. 00:30:53 And this is where he loses me for that very reason.
510. 00:30:57 So the idea of having a note card that you have a visual one side and text on the other.
511. 00:31:04 I agree like that's powerful.
512. 00:31:06 That makes a lot of sense.
513. 00:31:10 But then how do you implement that?
514. 00:31:13 You have to use really Excalabrain in order to do this sort of thing.
515. 00:31:19 That's additional functionality that you're adding to obsidian at this at this point,
516. 00:31:23 right? Because you've got the note and you can put all that stuff in the note,
517. 00:31:29 but you can't flip the note over and see the visual associated with it.
518. 00:31:35 I mean, I guess you could do you cover you in bases or something like that.
519. 00:31:39 No, you can. You can't.
520. 00:31:40 So basically it's the word you hate.
521. 00:31:42 It's the transclusion word that you hate.
522. 00:31:44 So what you can do is in you have the visual on the front side of it and it's
523. 00:31:49 actually an Excalidra front end.
524. 00:31:51 Yeah, then you can flip it to Markdown on the back and that's essentially the back
525. 00:31:56 of the note. So now you're writing it as Markdown and then you can embed the front
526. 00:32:00 end in that in that section.
527. 00:32:02 You can embed the visual from the front in that section.
528. 00:32:04 But that flipping mechanism isn't in obsidian by default, right?
529. 00:32:09 No, it is. Oh, sorry.
530. 00:32:11 It's an Excalidra. Yeah, exactly.
531. 00:32:14 So now you're locked into Excalidra and that's fine if you're committed to the
532. 00:32:20 system, but I've tried to commit to a system that was very prescriptive like
533. 00:32:25 this before. It's called Zetelkosten and I've failed at it multiple times.
534. 00:32:29 Why? I don't know because every time I look at it, I'm like, it makes sense.
535. 00:32:34 Bob Dotto makes a very compelling case for this in a system for writing.
536. 00:32:39 He makes it more approachable than it has ever been and I still fall on my face
537. 00:32:43 doing this. Does that mean that I am a failure as a developer of ideas?
538. 00:32:50 No, it does not, but that's how you feel when the prescriptive system does not work.
539. 00:32:57 So that has happened to me multiple times with Zetelkosten.
540. 00:33:00 We're now talking about visual Zetelkosten.
541. 00:33:03 He's using visuals in a little bit different ways than I would be using them.
542. 00:33:07 And he's prescribing this system and all I'm hearing in the back of my head
543. 00:33:13 as I'm going through this is warning, warning, warning.
544. 00:33:18 There be dragons and that could be completely
545. 00:33:21 unfair that that could be completely unfair, but that's just like the emotional
546. 00:33:27 reaction that I had going into this because I want to be able to take my notes.
547. 00:33:34 If I decide that obsidian no longer works for me, take them somewhere else,
548. 00:33:39 have all my play and markdown and be able to make something with them.
549. 00:33:42 And one of the traps that I think people fall into when it comes to making something
550. 00:33:46 of your notes and ideas is that if you don't follow the system, there is zero
551. 00:33:52 value there for you. It's either pass or fail and it's not.
552. 00:33:57 There is a lot of elements that you can apply from the things that he talks about
553. 00:34:02 in this book, which I do. I sketched note, I mind map, I create these canvases.
554. 00:34:08 I'm not going all the way with like the compass that he talks about and the idea
555. 00:34:13 integration boards and things like that.
556. 00:34:15 To me, that's a scaffolding that he has created, which allows these things to click
557. 00:34:22 for him. And if you are the person where that allows it to click for you, I see
558. 00:34:27 you waving your hands over there, Corey Hickson, then this is fantastic.
559. 00:34:32 Yes, but for everybody else, there is nothing wrong with you if this doesn't work.
560. 00:34:38 I agree. I could not agree with you more.
561. 00:34:40 I could not agree with you more.
562. 00:34:42 Like, I mean, I hope if if if Joel ever listens to this, I hope he realizes there's
563. 00:34:47 at least one other person in the world who thinks like he does and is that it finds
564. 00:34:53 this incredibly valuable and it like not blew my mind, but like it like opened up
565. 00:34:58 this idea of like, oh, my gosh, things connect in a way that they've never
566. 00:35:02 connected. I did have the same
567. 00:35:05 concern. It wasn't as like warning, warning, warning, like you're describing.
568. 00:35:08 I didn't think the same concern.
569. 00:35:09 I was like, I don't really want to hitch my wagon to Excalidra, just in case something
570. 00:35:13 blows up with Excalidra.
571. 00:35:14 But man, it just works so well that I was like, I'm going to give it a shot.
572. 00:35:19 Like I'm just going to see how this works.
573. 00:35:20 Let me let me say Excalidra is an amazing plug-in.
574. 00:35:22 I think it's the most downloaded plug-in in the Obsidian community plug-ins
575. 00:35:26 directory. I looked yesterday, it was like almost five million downloads and he
576. 00:35:31 states that like every couple of days, if there is one plug-in, I am not worried
577. 00:35:35 about disappearing. It is Excalidra, but still tying it to a specific community
578. 00:35:42 plug-in feels a little bit weird to me and ultimately it just doesn't fit for me.
579. 00:35:45 But the more important point, if there was only one person who thinks exactly
580. 00:35:50 this way, he still should have written this book.
581. 00:35:53 I am glad that he did it.
582. 00:35:54 And honestly, I would love to have him come give a presentation on this in the
583. 00:35:58 library because there are different people who approach these things in
584. 00:36:01 different ways and you have to find what clicks for you.
585. 00:36:04 So everything that I am going to share from my perspective is simply my perspective.
586. 00:36:11 That's great. OK, we have to we have to move.
587. 00:36:13 We're going to go to chapter four.
588. 00:36:14 In chapter four, he establishes a seven step visualization process, articulate
589. 00:36:18 the message, list the keywords, pick an illustration type, look for inspiration,
590. 00:36:22 use, link and think icons, make cognitive loops and then practice.
591. 00:36:26 So I could give or take this seven step visualization process.
592. 00:36:31 It was valuable to think through just kind of the way he did it.
593. 00:36:36 I didn't get a ton out of that, but the two points that he did make that made
594. 00:36:43 more sense to me in this chapter, a strong visual concept does two things.
595. 00:36:46 It transforms and it connects.
596. 00:36:48 So I like these two ideas, these two high level ideas.
597. 00:36:51 We are going to make a visual that transforms are thinking in some way.
598. 00:36:57 It's going to not make it more difficult, not make it more challenging.
599. 00:37:03 And this is my biggest problem with text-based notes.
600. 00:37:06 I don't transform text-based notes naturally.
601. 00:37:09 I know I should.
602. 00:37:11 I know that people have processes for this.
603. 00:37:13 You do your first round of highlights, then you go through and you make your
604. 00:37:16 things and then you do summaries and you do all the stuff. I can't I don't do that.
605. 00:37:21 I've read enough books at this point.
606. 00:37:23 I've studied enough subjects at this point.
607. 00:37:24 I've done enough. I'm not going to do that.
608. 00:37:26 I'm not that guy.
609. 00:37:27 I'm going to highlight.
610. 00:37:28 I'm going to check the box and I'm going to say, yay, I don't transform.
611. 00:37:32 Boom. It also, it's the second one, the connection idea.
612. 00:37:36 I know that we've read Bob Dotto's book.
613. 00:37:39 I know that I've studied Zetelkastit all over the place.
614. 00:37:42 I've looked at all this in a text-based format.
615. 00:37:44 I just don't care.
616. 00:37:46 I'm not going to go make those connections.
617. 00:37:48 It's really bothered me as we've made bookworm.
618. 00:37:50 I've gone, oh, I know we've talked about this somewhere else before, but I can't make
619. 00:37:55 that connection and I think I'm going to be able to do it a lot better in the visual
620. 00:38:00 thinking world as opposed to the text-based world.
621. 00:38:02 So I resonate with those two points a lot better than the seven steps to the visualization process.
622. 00:38:07 Yeah, so the thing with this, though,
623. 00:38:11 a time, well, time will tell. I feel like there is a lot more friction
624. 00:38:17 for creating an image associated with these things that you are capturing than there is with text.
625. 00:38:24 To find friction.
626. 00:38:25 So if you're taking notes on books that you read and you're reading
627. 00:38:31 you're reading digital books because it is less friction to create the images.
628. 00:38:36 How in the world are you going to take notes on books that you read if you're
629. 00:38:40 making visuals, you know, hey, thanks for throwing the jab at digital books there,
630. 00:38:45 but I mean, we're going to read Protestant squid next.
631. 00:38:48 I got it. Sorry, but no, you're I think your points will made and I'm not saying
632. 00:38:55 that to attack you personally, Corey, it's really just you have to figure out where
633. 00:38:59 to increase friction and where to decrease friction.
634. 00:39:02 And for me, thinking about I'm going through and reading atomic habits and I'm
635. 00:39:07 going to create a visual now about casting the vote for the type of person that you
636. 00:39:10 want to become. That feels like a lot of friction.
637. 00:39:14 Are you really going to stop reading to create that visual?
638. 00:39:18 And if you do, you're probably not going to read that many books.
639. 00:39:23 If so, what will happen for a lot of people, I think, if they try to do this is,
640. 00:39:27 oh, that's a great idea. I'm totally going to do that.
641. 00:39:29 First time they do it, it takes a lot
642. 00:39:30 longer than they thought next time there's friction there to create the visual.
643. 00:39:34 I'm not going to do it this time.
644. 00:39:36 And pretty soon they're not creating the visuals anymore.
645. 00:39:38 One of the atomic notes and because they just blew past it, having to go back
646. 00:39:43 and create them later, they're not going to do that either.
647. 00:39:46 So that that's the terrible scenario, you know, where this just doesn't click.
648. 00:39:50 And but that's how it would have that's how it would play out for me, for sure.
649. 00:39:54 I can tell you from a data point of one, that's me, right?
650. 00:39:58 You're absolutely right.
651. 00:40:00 It takes so much more time.
652. 00:40:02 It takes so much more time to figure out the visuals and try to figure out how to
653. 00:40:06 collect the visuals and how to lay them out on the idea boards and the story
654. 00:40:10 boards and all the other boards.
655. 00:40:11 You're absolutely right.
656. 00:40:13 I don't know how this will end, but I can tell you that I've made I'm sorry,
657. 00:40:17 I've made one and a half of these boards at this point with making all the
658. 00:40:21 individual illustrations into them or at least figuring out what I want the
659. 00:40:25 illustrations to be and it takes way more time.
660. 00:40:28 But it just feels so much better, Mike.
661. 00:40:31 I completely agree with that.
662. 00:40:33 I completely empathize with that, by the way, because that's what what the mind
663. 00:40:36 nodes are for me, like the mind maps from the book notes.
664. 00:40:39 People look at it like that takes so much time.
665. 00:40:40 Like, yeah, but it's awesome.
666. 00:40:43 And I have that same feeling for you because I never really understood it with
667. 00:40:47 you. I was like, I'm fine.
668. 00:40:48 Like, I'm okay with it.
669. 00:40:49 But now that I've done this, I'm like, this is great.
670. 00:40:52 This is amazing.
671. 00:40:53 So, okay, chapter five, now we're into your into your world.
672. 00:40:57 Mike, I touted you as the mind map guy, at least in my world.
673. 00:41:01 You're my mind map guy.
674. 00:41:04 So chapter five is mapping the mind and basically he talks about, you know,
675. 00:41:09 making mind maps and he lays out a an idea, another idea called brick road.
676. 00:41:17 He lays out another idea called concept maps and then a fourth idea called idea
677. 00:41:21 Alice's mind maps are the one that you probably are the most familiar with.
678. 00:41:26 It's got a central node and then from that central node, you branch out into
679. 00:41:31 even more sub nodes and it's the traditional like as you go down, you get more and
680. 00:41:38 more detailed or as you go out from the center, you get more and more detailed.
681. 00:41:42 I think it makes the most sense to go to concept maps next because concept
682. 00:41:46 maps are like mind maps only.
683. 00:41:48 They're more hierarchical, hierarchy, I can't say the word, right?
684. 00:41:52 They go from the top down.
685. 00:41:53 Yeah, top down, right?
686. 00:41:55 So either top down or left or right.
687. 00:41:57 And they're going to flow in a more intentional way.
688. 00:42:00 So they're your like org chart for your organization.
689. 00:42:03 It's the concept map around your org chart.
690. 00:42:06 The how to lay a brick road is interesting to me.
691. 00:42:08 So start with the blank page, one idea per tile size adapts to the content,
692. 00:42:13 connect as you go visuals, mix visuals and text and then redefine after the fact.
693. 00:42:19 I I kind of think it's it's a mind map or it's it's a concept map.
694. 00:42:25 I don't know like I don't know what it is.
695. 00:42:28 Yeah, like I don't know how to how to say it because it's not a road.
696. 00:42:33 It's not a brick road.
697. 00:42:34 It's like you're building almost like a rock wall.
698. 00:42:38 And you're trying to find like what size rocks need to fit into the next one,
699. 00:42:42 like an old school rock wall where you're trying to find the next one and then
700. 00:42:45 you're trying to connect those in the in the best way.
701. 00:42:47 And the last one I'm going to be real honest with you.
702. 00:42:51 Like I don't I don't get idealist's.
703. 00:42:53 I've read that section twice because I really kind of wanted to understand idealist's.
704. 00:42:58 I would read the four steps he gives start with start with the whole break it
705. 00:43:04 into parts return to the whole repeat as as necessary.
706. 00:43:07 I just don't I don't have this one.
707. 00:43:09 So those are the four the four core concepts he talks about in mapping the mind though.
708. 00:43:14 Yeah.
709. 00:43:17 I have issues with the yellow brick road
710. 00:43:20 because the instructions with that are like more important topics are supposed
711. 00:43:26 to be bigger bricks, right?
712. 00:43:29 And I can't even pick that up.
713. 00:43:31 What's that?
714. 00:43:32 I didn't even pick that up.
715. 00:43:33 So that yeah, big ideas to be oversized.
716. 00:43:37 Yeah, I didn't even pick that up.
717. 00:43:39 The problem is I don't think you know which ideas are big ideas as you're like
718. 00:43:44 working through a book, for example, maybe it's more obvious if you're
719. 00:43:49 attending a seminar or something.
720. 00:43:51 But I think that would cause me to stumble.
721. 00:43:57 It's just like, well, how big should I make this brick?
722. 00:43:59 I have no idea.
723. 00:44:00 And I have never seen a digital app where you can just create these and oh,
724. 00:44:06 this one should have been bigger.
725. 00:44:07 So I'm going to resize it and then everything else just kind of filters in around it.
726. 00:44:11 That's what I love about digital mind mapping is I can throw stuff on there
727. 00:44:14 and then I can move it around later if I want to.
728. 00:44:18 And so stuff will snap into the right place.
729. 00:44:21 So the other brick road is not appealing to me at all.
730. 00:44:25 The concept maps about going from the sorry, go ahead.
731. 00:44:27 This is a this is a good a key difference between you and I too.
732. 00:44:30 I'm learning all these differences between you and I.
733. 00:44:32 I love the open flowy nature of it.
734. 00:44:36 Like my node, the fact that it like tries to in a smart way put the thing where
735. 00:44:42 where it thinks it should go bothers the crud out of me.
736. 00:44:45 Like I can't stand that it does that.
737. 00:44:47 And you like the organization of that you like the structure that that's cool.
738. 00:44:51 I like that we're finding our because ultimately the structure should be there
739. 00:44:58 in any book that you read, but you kind of have to discover it as you as you go.
740. 00:45:03 So you make arrows and connections between different things and you group
741. 00:45:08 things together, all that kind of stuff, which I do and I did for this book,
742. 00:45:12 but I wanted to do it my way.
743. 00:45:14 I didn't want to do it the way my node made me do it.
744. 00:45:16 So that's a that's a big difference.
745. 00:45:17 I mean, you can you can turn off the auto auto formatting.
746. 00:45:22 I think there are other apps like Scappell made by the people who did Scrivener
747. 00:45:26 where it's literally just you drop things onto a big infinite canvas.
748. 00:45:30 I mean, canvas inside Obsidian could do that sort of thing too.
749. 00:45:35 But yeah, like when you're creating a mind map,
750. 00:45:38 you don't know what you've got.
751. 00:45:40 You're putting all the stuff out there and the direction doesn't matter.
752. 00:45:43 And you should be able to move things around with a concept map.
753. 00:45:46 I don't like that term concept map.
754. 00:45:49 It is an org chart.
755. 00:45:51 That's the the version of this.
756. 00:45:55 And I feel like if I'm going to sit down and develop an idea for something,
757. 00:46:02 having all of these tools to choose from can be a little bit paralyzing sometimes.
758. 00:46:08 Agree.
759. 00:46:09 If you're going to map the mind.
760. 00:46:12 Do you have any idea if you're OK, I'm going to totally follow this format.
761. 00:46:16 I'm going to use all the tools that he describes.
762. 00:46:19 How do you choose which one, which scenario you use a mind map
763. 00:46:22 versus yellow brick road versus concept map versus idea atlas?
764. 00:46:25 And he would probably say trial and error.
765. 00:46:28 And I completely 100% agree with that, you know, find the thing that works.
766. 00:46:32 He would probably say, you know, if yellow brick road doesn't work for you,
767. 00:46:34 just forget that one and use the ones that do.
768. 00:46:37 But yeah, again, I guess just my issues with my all of the previous learning
769. 00:46:44 I have done around visual thinking being brought into this book and me having
770. 00:46:49 to figure out how to reconcile these things.
771. 00:46:52 That's fair.
772. 00:46:53 That's very fair.
773. 00:46:54 And I I'm not defending.
774. 00:46:56 I think the way I interpreted chapter five was I'm just trying to give you tools
775. 00:47:01 about ways to organize things.
776. 00:47:02 And these are four tools that I think are pretty good picking those as difficult.
777. 00:47:08 And I struggled with that as well.
778. 00:47:10 Are we OK to go to chapter six and go into the to the next tool?
779. 00:47:13 Let's do it.
780. 00:47:15 All right, so navigation and emergence is chapter six through eight.
781. 00:47:19 So we're in this chapter is all about a thing called he calls the idea integration
782. 00:47:24 board and the best way I can describe the idea integration board is you've watched
783. 00:47:28 that detective show where the detective is in their apartment and they don't have
784. 00:47:32 a bed and they sleep on the couch and they've been eaten take out for, you know,
785. 00:47:36 a million years because they're all the detective shows are all the same.
786. 00:47:39 But on the one wall where they've removed all the art,
787. 00:47:43 they have the pictures and the articles and the little handwritten notes and then
788. 00:47:47 they've got the red line, the red wire going through all those and it's showing
789. 00:47:51 the connections that how all these ideas connect and how they all go.
790. 00:47:55 That's the idea integration board and Mike, I'm going to say it again.
791. 00:47:59 This is another area completely clicked for me.
792. 00:48:02 Absolutely 100 percent.
793. 00:48:04 I was like, I get this.
794. 00:48:06 This makes so much sense.
795. 00:48:08 If I make these notes that are visual on the front and text on the back and then
796. 00:48:13 I put them in there and I figure out how they fit together and how this connects.
797. 00:48:19 And then I do the exact same, like I use those exact same notes for a different
798. 00:48:23 idea, for a different idea, for a different idea.
799. 00:48:26 I was like, I'm in, like I'm totally 100 percent in.
800. 00:48:30 And at this point, I get two action items.
801. 00:48:33 All right.
802. 00:48:34 So my two action items that come from this are one, I'm going to do this for this book.
803. 00:48:39 I'm going to actually create an idea integration board or what he would call a
804. 00:48:44 book on a page.
805. 00:48:45 So I'm going to create a book on a page for this.
806. 00:48:49 Yeah, I'm not sure those are the exact same thing, but I get I get your your action
807. 00:48:55 item here.
808. 00:48:56 They may not be the exact same thing, but I'm going to call them the same thing.
809. 00:48:59 Like in my mind walking away from this book, these are the same thing.
810. 00:49:03 OK, so I'm going to do this for this.
811. 00:49:05 And then I'm I think I told you I'm taking like a mini seminary class right now.
812. 00:49:09 So I'm reading and thinking a lot about the Bible and different aspects of the Bible.
813. 00:49:13 And I was like, I'm doing this for for it's called the Institute.
814. 00:49:16 I'm doing this for the Institute as well.
815. 00:49:18 I'm going to do this idea integration board for the Institute as well.
816. 00:49:21 So these are two of my action items.
817. 00:49:22 I've already done one of them, but go to pages done check.
818. 00:49:25 That is why a lot of the other follow up items.
819. 00:49:29 I didn't even remember I was doing this because I was working on this.
820. 00:49:32 I was like in that like focused zone out, this is fun.
821. 00:49:36 I'm having a ton of fun mode.
822. 00:49:38 So I just forgot about all those other things.
823. 00:49:40 But let's get back to the the idea integration board.
824. 00:49:44 There's four steps to building it pick a topic and gather your pieces,
825. 00:49:48 create your workspace, everything visual.
826. 00:49:50 So relationships become apparent, connect in a range, create meaning.
827. 00:49:54 And don't worry about aesthetics yet.
828. 00:49:56 And then keep it alive and review it periodically.
829. 00:49:59 So those are the four and that's why I say book on a page is a form of this is
830. 00:50:02 because I'm just going to gather all the stuff from the book.
831. 00:50:05 I'm going to make them visuals.
832. 00:50:06 I'm going to put them in the map.
833. 00:50:07 I'm going to figure out how they how they organize and together.
834. 00:50:09 I think you're technically right that there are two different things,
835. 00:50:13 but that's the way my brain works.
836. 00:50:15 So what kind of page doesn't show up until chapter 10, I think.
837. 00:50:19 OK, I'm going to call it an idea integration board for a book.
838. 00:50:22 That's fine. That's fine.
839. 00:50:23 So I also have an action item from this this chapter.
840. 00:50:29 And I'm going to use the term idea integration board because he's given us that.
841. 00:50:34 He defines it, by the way, as a visual map of content with superpowers.
842. 00:50:39 What exactly are those superpowers who knows, but I actually don't like
843. 00:50:45 the full description of building your idea integration board.
844. 00:50:49 I probably agree in principle with 98 percent of it, but it's those little
845. 00:50:53 nitpicky details that OK, drive me crazy.
846. 00:50:57 So my action item is to use something completely different.
847. 00:51:02 That he does not reference in this book at all.
848. 00:51:05 As my quote, unquote idea integration board, OK.
849. 00:51:10 All right, are you familiar with an app called Sublime?
850. 00:51:14 No, not sublime text, just sublime, just sublime.
851. 00:51:17 So no, I'm not familiar with this.
852. 00:51:18 I they sponsored David Pirel's How I Write podcast recently.
853. 00:51:26 OK, and he mentioned it there and I went and looked at it and this is cool.
854. 00:51:32 So this is you can sell me on a broad definition of the idea integration board,
855. 00:51:38 but this is the way that I want it to work.
856. 00:51:41 I don't want to create all this stuff using a scalar draw inside of Obsidian.
857. 00:51:45 With sublime, you basically have like your cards, like he's describing here.
858. 00:51:51 And you put your note there, whatever you bring in the web page, the YouTube video,
859. 00:51:57 whatever, and then it will suggest related items based on all the other sublime
860. 00:52:04 users who have been building these boards on related topics.
861. 00:52:10 So think like AI recommendations, but actually good because there are other
862. 00:52:15 people who are selecting these things.
863. 00:52:18 And, you know, that they're trying to figure out the answers to the same types
864. 00:52:23 of questions that you're you're asking.
865. 00:52:27 And I really like this idea where you just put something in there and what are
866. 00:52:32 the related pieces and just drop them on the canvas and figure out how this stuff
867. 00:52:36 connects, that's sublime in a nutshell with the intention of taking this and then
868. 00:52:41 creating something new out of it, right?
869. 00:52:43 It's kind of their whole thing.
870. 00:52:45 But the place where it differs, I feel like, is once I'm done with that,
871. 00:52:49 I am going to chuck that and move on to the next thing and never look back.
872. 00:52:55 I'm going to be OK with that.
873. 00:52:57 I don't want to do that.
874. 00:52:59 I don't want to do that.
875. 00:52:59 I don't want to chuck it.
876. 00:53:00 I get what you're coming from, but I don't want to chuck it.
877. 00:53:03 I want that to be there and I can refine it and make it better.
878. 00:53:06 Yeah.
879. 00:53:09 So I'm a recovering perfectionist.
880. 00:53:11 The way I get that desire, I feel like the way to get good at stuff is
881. 00:53:21 the just do lots of stuff.
882. 00:53:23 Yeah.
883. 00:53:23 So just me personally, by trying to make it better, I will revise and I will
884. 00:53:29 revise and I will revise and I will revise and I will revise and I will revise.
885. 00:53:32 And I have learned the hard way that the real way to get good at something is to
886. 00:53:36 quit revising, just move on to the next thing.
887. 00:53:38 And three years, five years from now, you'll come back to that same topic.
888. 00:53:43 You'll write about it again and it will be much better because you've put in
889. 00:53:46 enough reps and you've gotten enough feedback loops.
890. 00:53:50 OK, OK.
891. 00:53:51 All right, let's move to chapter seven.
892. 00:53:53 This is navigating your knowledge.
893. 00:53:54 Basically, we've got one, two, three, four ideas again here in navigating your
894. 00:54:00 knowledge, he says landmarks, just like if you're traveling through a city, you may
895. 00:54:05 not know the exact address of something, but you know when I get to that mountain,
896. 00:54:08 about another five minutes or when I get to that, you know, sculpture, I'm almost
897. 00:54:13 there, I need to make two lefts and a right.
898. 00:54:15 So this idea of landmarks and he says visuals help you make landmarks more
899. 00:54:20 effectively than than text.
900. 00:54:21 So you've got this landmarks to anchor memory.
901. 00:54:23 I have a hilarious story about that, by the way, because my parents cleared some
902. 00:54:29 land in Northern Wisconsin and built a cabin.
903. 00:54:32 Like they appealed the logs, built the cabin by hand with my aunt, my uncle.
904. 00:54:36 And it's like way up there.
905. 00:54:38 So there's no traffic lights, there's no gas stations and they give people
906. 00:54:42 directions to get to this cabin and the address is like one oh nine seven three
907. 00:54:48 something East Flowage Road, something like that.
908. 00:54:51 And they always would say once you get on to that main road, just turn right past
909. 00:54:56 the tree in the middle of the road and people are like, how do I know which
910. 00:54:59 tree is in the middle of the road?
911. 00:55:01 I'm like, oh, you'll know.
912. 00:55:05 That's I love that. Yeah, yeah, I love that those places where go to the go to
913. 00:55:10 where you see the cow.
914. 00:55:12 What what cow cow you know what I mean?
915. 00:55:15 There's a flying there's a pig a pig flying on our one drive that boys love.
916. 00:55:19 They talk about the pig all right.
917. 00:55:21 So the second concept here is called latch.
918. 00:55:24 It's basically idea entry points, location, alphabet, time, category and hierarchy.
919. 00:55:29 He has the idea compass, which North is basically like what are the parents of
920. 00:55:34 this idea south or what are the children of this idea East is what challenges this
921. 00:55:39 idea or what contradicts it and then West is what aligns or supports it.
922. 00:55:44 If I'm not mistaken, Mike, and I I'm not a hundred percent confident on this,
923. 00:55:48 I think this is where Excaliburne comes from.
924. 00:55:52 So I think he develops Excaliburne from you taking your ideas in the back of your
925. 00:55:58 cards and categorizing them in a certain way and then he pops this into Excaliburne
926. 00:56:03 southeast and West.
927. 00:56:04 I don't know that for a fact, but I think that's how it's developed.
928. 00:56:07 Could be the directions didn't really resonate with me.
929. 00:56:13 I like the concepts, though, like having
930. 00:56:16 parent ideas and having children ideas.
931. 00:56:19 That's kind of a concept from my note, but there's somebody in the library.
932. 00:56:24 Buddy Quirk has gone big into like the breadcrumbs plug-in for establishing
933. 00:56:29 those connections and relationships between notes.
934. 00:56:32 And I think that's a pretty clever idea.
935. 00:56:34 The West versus East kind of kind of loses me.
936. 00:56:37 I do like the idea of the latch system, by the way, which comes from another book.
937. 00:56:42 I think it's information anxiety.
938. 00:56:45 And I don't remember which Richard Richard
939. 00:56:48 Saul Wurman is the name of the person I put down.
940. 00:56:51 Yeah. So I actually jotted down this this book and I was like, oh, maybe I should
941. 00:56:55 read this for for book bookworm.
942. 00:56:57 It is the second version that he's got here.
943. 00:57:00 It's currently a soft cover and it's available for $50.
944. 00:57:05 Wow. So I don't know if it's like out
945. 00:57:07 of print or what the deal is, but I've heard multiple people refer to this book,
946. 00:57:11 which leads to a larger point that I should call out a lot of the books that
947. 00:57:16 Jolt is referring to.
948. 00:57:18 I always said it's Zolt.
949. 00:57:19 I got to get used to Jolt.
950. 00:57:21 Yeah, you said it right.
951. 00:57:22 OK, a lot of the books that Zolt refers to are books that I have read and I have
952. 00:57:27 enjoyed. I feel like we could sit down and talk about books and have a great time.
953. 00:57:30 I didn't doubt that at all.
954. 00:57:32 I was like, I bet you liked this.
955. 00:57:33 I bet you liked this, right?
956. 00:57:34 Like most just because of the stuff you've done in.
957. 00:57:37 Yeah, just the stuff you've done in your in your workshops and your classes and stuff.
958. 00:57:40 I thought that I like the idea of the information anxiety, though, in that latch
959. 00:57:43 system, I do want to take a look at this book because I think I have it have it
960. 00:57:47 somewhere and I won't make you read it with me yet, but he did talk about though.
961. 00:57:53 I forget exactly where this was tied to.
962. 00:57:56 I think it was the landmark idea.
963. 00:58:00 I had the realization that I sort of have those in my mind maps already with the
964. 00:58:06 emoji coding system that I use for like the key ideas and the places where I get
965. 00:58:11 inspired, the quotes, the related books, things like that.
966. 00:58:14 And I got me thinking how I bring those over into Obsidian.
967. 00:58:20 I have the PDF of the mind map and I also export all the text and I have those list
968. 00:58:24 callouts, which like apply a highlighter color behind them based on the emoji at
969. 00:58:30 the beginning of the bullet.
970. 00:58:32 I'm not sure if you've seen that, but like all of the key ideas have this gold
971. 00:58:35 background, all of the quotes have this purple background.
972. 00:58:38 It's something you can do with a with a plug-in.
973. 00:58:41 And then I've got the quote book that I put together, which is basically a query that
974. 00:58:47 finds everything that has that quote emoji at the beginning and then the tag quote,
975. 00:58:51 I think also, and it got me thinking, could I because I am already dropping these
976. 00:58:57 landmarks in the notes from the books that I read?
977. 00:58:59 Could I create separate query pages for those places where I got inspired?
978. 00:59:05 The key ideas where it would just show all of the key ideas that I've collected,
979. 00:59:11 just those bullets, right?
980. 00:59:14 But it would have them sorted on those queries by the title, the source that it came
981. 00:59:21 from. I'm going to try and put that together.
982. 00:59:23 I think it's going to be a little bit trickier because I don't think I can create
983. 00:59:26 just based on the emoji. I may also have to apply a tag when I am processing these
984. 00:59:32 notes in Obsidian, but if I could do that, that could be pretty cool because I could
985. 00:59:37 just look at what are all the key ideas and I could look at the key ideas from
986. 00:59:41 the different books and just looking at a list of those things I feel like could be
987. 00:59:45 inspiring in terms of what am I going to do with this or where do I go from here?
988. 00:59:49 Yeah, nice. Very cool.
989. 00:59:52 Oh, I have to ask you about the cave tunnels in this chapter.
990. 00:59:56 Did you like the idea of the cave tunnels and the stories that he told about
991. 01:00:00 exploring the caves? Are you like, yeah, let's go?
992. 01:00:02 Or were you like me and like, heck no.
993. 01:00:05 So I've been in caves and been in a situation where the lights are off and you
994. 01:00:12 have no clue because one of the crazy things about caving is you get down in there.
995. 01:00:17 If you lose your light, you go crazy before you die because you can't orient
996. 01:00:23 yourself like you have no way to figure out which way's up, down, left, right or
997. 01:00:27 anything like that. And you they say you'll go nuts before and then you end up
998. 01:00:30 like just randomly walking and tripping over something and then now you're
999. 01:00:34 completely, you're completely done. So it's like, I've been in there and he's
1000. 01:00:37 describing this and I was like, oh, yeah, you definitely needed bread crumbs.
1001. 01:00:40 You definitely needed a rope, you know, like that's why you attach a rope to
1002. 01:00:43 yourself and you never, you know, try to just know the, know the routes because
1003. 01:00:49 you get mixed up and turned around.
1004. 01:00:52 It was a good, it was a good story, though.
1005. 01:00:54 OK, so chapter eight, the serendipity machine.
1006. 01:00:57 Now, Mike, he loses me here a little bit.
1007. 01:01:00 He talks about the double bubble map, which is a way to compare and contrast.
1008. 01:01:04 I like the idea of the double bubble map.
1009. 01:01:06 So the double bubble map is essentially two mind maps that are really small put
1010. 01:01:12 together. And if you imagine that the two central nodes are the idea, like the core
1011. 01:01:17 ideas, there's a row of nodes in between those that are common.
1012. 01:01:21 So these are things that they share or that are similar.
1013. 01:01:24 And then on the outsides or on the other side, I guess, of the central node are
1014. 01:01:28 the things where they differ.
1015. 01:01:29 And it's a way to like force you to think about two ideas and compare and contrast
1016. 01:01:33 to ideas. Good. I'm in for that.
1017. 01:01:35 Will I ever use it? I have no idea.
1018. 01:01:37 But like the idea, like the concept gets me.
1019. 01:01:40 He also talks about the idea mixer board.
1020. 01:01:42 And at this point, I went, hold on, we got too many boards.
1021. 01:01:46 Like I can't, I can't keep track.
1022. 01:01:48 I got the idea integration board.
1023. 01:01:49 I got the mixer board. I got the idea atlas.
1024. 01:01:52 Like I'm getting overwhelmed here, like I'm getting over.
1025. 01:01:56 There's too many visualizations and maybe if I advance to a certain level of
1026. 01:02:01 expertise, all of these boards make sense to me.
1027. 01:02:04 And I understand the reason for all these boards, but this is the point.
1028. 01:02:08 So chapter eight is the point where I broke it.
1029. 01:02:10 I went, hold on, we've got too many boards.
1030. 01:02:14 Like I just can't do this much of visualization stuff.
1031. 01:02:19 And that's OK.
1032. 01:02:20 Like, well, we can we can figure that out, but that's that was my take on.
1033. 01:02:24 This is where I broke.
1034. 01:02:24 You broke a lot earlier than me.
1035. 01:02:26 I did.
1036. 01:02:27 I actually really like the idea of the double bubble map.
1037. 01:02:30 Basically, what you've got is concept one on one side,
1038. 01:02:34 concept two on the other side.
1039. 01:02:35 And then in between, you have bubbles for the things that they have in common.
1040. 01:02:38 And you have lines from those concepts to those things that they share.
1041. 01:02:41 And then lines away towards the outside for things that are different.
1042. 01:02:46 I feel like that could be a useful tool in certain scenarios for finding the
1043. 01:02:50 overlap between the different things.
1044. 01:02:52 The idea mixer board, I agree, we've got all the great boards at this point.
1045. 01:02:57 And I think it's unnecessarily complicated for me, at least at this point,
1046. 01:03:03 where really it's you're not sure what you think about this thing.
1047. 01:03:09 Grab a canvas, drop some stuff on there and start playing.
1048. 01:03:15 See how things connect.
1049. 01:03:18 I don't care if you call it an idea integration board.
1050. 01:03:21 I don't care if you call it a mind map.
1051. 01:03:23 I don't care if you call it an idea mixer.
1052. 01:03:25 I don't care if you call it a concept map.
1053. 01:03:27 Those are unnecessary details.
1054. 01:03:30 Just put it on the workbench.
1055. 01:03:33 No rules, no boundaries, just a couple of things.
1056. 01:03:38 That's the key, I think, is the constraints in terms of the number of things
1057. 01:03:41 that you are playing with, not, you know, they've got to flow in this particular
1058. 01:03:45 area, they've got to be organized in this particular way.
1059. 01:03:48 Just play with it.
1060. 01:03:51 I could not I could not agree more.
1061. 01:03:54 That makes complete sense, complete and total sense.
1062. 01:03:57 OK, I'm good to go to the last section.
1063. 01:04:00 So the last major section is chapter nine building through loop.
1064. 01:04:03 So are you good with that?
1065. 01:04:04 Yep.
1066. 01:04:05 OK, he is.
1067. 01:04:06 So in building through loops, he's going to
1068. 01:04:09 or sorry, in chapter nine, he's going to talk about trains of thought.
1069. 01:04:12 And he compares this to pools of thought.
1070. 01:04:15 And again, Mike, he gets me.
1071. 01:04:17 This makes total sense to me because I
1072. 01:04:20 think what I've been doing most, if not all of my life, is having pools of thought.
1073. 01:04:25 I've not done a great job at linking trains of thought.
1074. 01:04:29 The exception to this is let's see if you go back.
1075. 01:04:32 I don't know if you and I have ever talked about this, but let's see if you go back.
1076. 01:04:34 Do you know a program or an app called Voodoo Pad?
1077. 01:04:38 Yes, OK.
1078. 01:04:40 The best time I've ever.
1079. 01:04:43 No, the best time I've ever like the most
1080. 01:04:46 effective I've ever been at trains of thought was with Voodoo Pad.
1081. 01:04:49 I made my own wiki around the literature that was associated with my dissertation.
1082. 01:04:54 And it was because I had all of this stuff and I had to figure out a way to get it
1083. 01:05:00 like organized, I had to figure out a way how things connected and why they connected
1084. 01:05:04 and what arguments I was trying to make in this argument develops from these two.
1085. 01:05:07 Between Voodoo Pad and just note cards, right?
1086. 01:05:11 Like Voodoo Pad and note cards, those were the two ways I did this.
1087. 01:05:14 I don't do this inherently, though, like I don't do this naturally.
1088. 01:05:18 I only do it when I get like overwhelmed with
1089. 01:05:20 you know, ideas and like there's so much I can't process.
1090. 01:05:23 But I think I could do this more often as I could do this, trying to develop
1091. 01:05:27 trains of thought, trying to develop trains of thought.
1092. 01:05:29 You talk about this all the time in terms of like creating.
1093. 01:05:32 Take the things you're learning and turn it into something, a blog post, a YouTube
1094. 01:05:37 video, a course or whatever it is.
1095. 01:05:39 So I've heard you talk about this all the time and all what you're doing is
1096. 01:05:41 you're developing trains of thought, you're taking pulls of thought, you're pulling
1097. 01:05:44 them into trains of thought and then you're communicating that train of thought
1098. 01:05:47 to somebody else, which helps you develop the train of thought.
1099. 01:05:49 So I like this idea like this kind of opened up a lot of stuff for me in terms
1100. 01:05:54 of thinking, were you familiar with the the NOMA method?
1101. 01:05:58 Because that's from linking your thinking, isn't it?
1102. 01:06:02 Nick Milo.
1103. 01:06:03 I'm familiar with the term.
1104. 01:06:05 I didn't actually define it though.
1105. 01:06:08 So I don't remember exactly what it is.
1106. 01:06:11 Basically, he calls it I was be a thing finder, be a link finder, be an active
1107. 01:06:16 thinker and then understand its relevance.
1108. 01:06:17 But I don't remember at all.
1109. 01:06:20 I even looked this up, right?
1110. 01:06:21 When I was when I was doing things, I don't remember at all what NOMA means.
1111. 01:06:26 It means something.
1112. 01:06:27 It's got to think, well, I could Google it real quick, but I don't really hear
1113. 01:06:30 that much, but it means I'm just saying it means something.
1114. 01:06:34 Then the last one that are I guess there's two more.
1115. 01:06:37 Enduring questions.
1116. 01:06:38 I really liked enduring questions.
1117. 01:06:40 What are these things and can I link all of the thoughts that I'm having or all
1118. 01:06:44 the trains of thoughts to these enduring questions?
1119. 01:06:46 I really like that idea.
1120. 01:06:47 I actually have my next action item coming out of here is what are my enduring
1121. 01:06:51 questions?
1122. 01:06:52 What are these things that like and we've called them true Norths before.
1123. 01:06:56 We've called them these other core values would be another word.
1124. 01:06:59 I think that would tie into here.
1125. 01:07:01 I like I like this idea of enduring questions.
1126. 01:07:03 It's a different way to think about the same ideas.
1127. 01:07:05 And then finally, he gives an example of how he links things and his prompts.
1128. 01:07:09 You know, caught my interest source answer.
1129. 01:07:12 I think he's using these with data view in obsidian.
1130. 01:07:16 I'm pretty sure he is and that's how he's forming some of his other queries
1131. 01:07:21 and other things with obsidian.
1132. 01:07:23 So that's the nature of chapter nine.
1133. 01:07:26 What are your thoughts on it?
1134. 01:07:28 Well, I like the idea of tying things back to questions.
1135. 01:07:34 However, I don't like the idea of my 12 favorite questions because it's actually
1136. 01:07:39 my 12 favorite problems by Richard Feynman.
1137. 01:07:44 OK, little nuance there, which is probably not important for 99% of people.
1138. 01:07:50 So I don't really blame Jolt for framing it that way.
1139. 01:07:54 But when I read it, I was like, wait a second.
1140. 01:07:56 No, problems are really things that I want to to address.
1141. 01:08:03 The idea is you've got this note with these 12 favorite problems, which I have
1142. 01:08:06 in obsidian and they're basically things that you consider over the long term.
1143. 01:08:11 And eventually you stumble on something that is an answer to one of those those
1144. 01:08:16 problems and my problems are all framed as questions.
1145. 01:08:19 So it's really just in reference to the concept and the original source because
1146. 01:08:24 Richard Feynman was the one who came up with this idea and I think it's pretty brilliant.
1147. 01:08:28 So mine are like, how can I make things easier or simpler?
1148. 01:08:31 How can I live with more meaning? How can I live up my life theme?
1149. 01:08:33 How can I create more and consume less?
1150. 01:08:35 Who are my true fans?
1151. 01:08:36 What do they want?
1152. 01:08:37 How can I better lead and serve my family, wife and kids?
1153. 01:08:39 How can I have more fun?
1154. 01:08:40 How can I set my kids up for success?
1155. 01:08:42 What about this would make a good story?
1156. 01:08:44 What can I learn here?
1157. 01:08:45 How can I leave my dent in the universe?
1158. 01:08:47 How can I focus on what really matters?
1159. 01:08:50 And there's there's different applications of this where you're getting more
1160. 01:08:53 specific and you're saying, how do I write a killer thesis or whatever?
1161. 01:09:00 So the real thing I think that he's talking
1162. 01:09:02 about is don't just capture these ideas into these pools as you describe them,
1163. 01:09:08 but connect them back to something that is a little bit more.
1164. 01:09:14 I was going to say tangible.
1165. 01:09:15 That's not the right word, though.
1166. 01:09:16 Like it has a little bit more weight to it.
1167. 01:09:19 It's something that you actually are turning over in your brain actively.
1168. 01:09:23 Not just, oh, hey, new shiny, that sounds important.
1169. 01:09:26 I better capture that so that I can do nothing with it, you know, at some point
1170. 01:09:31 in the future.
1171. 01:09:33 Well, welcome to my problem.
1172. 01:09:35 Yeah, I think I do that.
1173. 01:09:37 Like I think I do that.
1174. 01:09:38 So OK, I mean, that yeah, so I really think there's some some good stuff in here,
1175. 01:09:45 but I actually don't have a whole lot written down from this particular chapter,
1176. 01:09:50 either just the the favorite questions as the the anchor.
1177. 01:09:54 I think that's that's kind of interesting.
1178. 01:09:55 Reading a book is like opening a box of Lego.
1179. 01:09:57 I think that's a cool metaphor.
1180. 01:10:00 This is where he introduces the idea or the definition of visual Zellikosten,
1181. 01:10:04 which is a network of these link sketches where each visual captures one idea.
1182. 01:10:08 And this is where I understand conceptually what he's driving at there.
1183. 01:10:15 And I'm just like, I am not going to do this.
1184. 01:10:19 Got it.
1185. 01:10:20 That makes sense, but more power to you, Corey Hickson, who is I have done it.
1186. 01:10:27 And for at least for the time being, I'm going to keep doing it.
1187. 01:10:29 Yeah, all right.
1188. 01:10:30 Chapter 10, create thinking loops with storyboards.
1189. 01:10:34 So he would say, and I didn't remember this until I just looked at my notes
1190. 01:10:39 for for this chapter 10, he would say a book on a pages storyboard.
1191. 01:10:43 Then it's telling the story of the book using these other concepts and using
1192. 01:10:48 other other ideas, he gets into storytelling and says that we should move
1193. 01:10:53 from and then to but therefore.
1194. 01:10:57 So and then just continues and it feels like a run on story, run on sentence,
1195. 01:11:01 and then and then and then he goes and those are boring.
1196. 01:11:04 We want to use but therefore.
1197. 01:11:06 So this was the problem, but I did this.
1198. 01:11:08 Therefore, this happened or this was better or whatever it might be.
1199. 01:11:11 So he's going to kind of go off on a little bit of a tangent there, I think.
1200. 01:11:16 And this idea of stories and like what good stories are, then he's going to come
1201. 01:11:19 back and he's going to basically tie into like some philosophy stuff, ethos, pathos,
1202. 01:11:25 logos, and he's all he's talking about basically storyboards and how do we create
1203. 01:11:29 these, the book on a page concept.
1204. 01:11:31 I will tell you, Mike, I love the idea of the book on the page concept.
1205. 01:11:35 So he does it.
1206. 01:11:36 He gives an example for atomic habits and he you see essentially his whole thing
1207. 01:11:43 together in chapter 10, where he's got the atomic habits cover and then he's got
1208. 01:11:49 all of these small little, I'm going to call them modules.
1209. 01:11:53 They're visual notes, right?
1210. 01:11:54 And they're either two by two or one by one or one by two or two by two or.
1211. 01:11:59 Yeah, I think I said three by two, whatever it might be.
1212. 01:12:02 And he's link, he's putting all these together in like side by side in the
1213. 01:12:06 different major sections of the book.
1214. 01:12:09 So what I did was I created one of these four, sketch your mind as a way to practice
1215. 01:12:14 this and say, like, does this actually work for me?
1216. 01:12:16 I'm not nearly as refined as he is.
1217. 01:12:19 Like if you look at his, his looks almost like four infographics that are
1218. 01:12:25 stacked together and the infographic walks you through the core premises of atomic
1219. 01:12:29 habits and how you do it.
1220. 01:12:31 Mine's much more here's chapter one.
1221. 01:12:35 Here are visuals for the core ideas in chapter one.
1222. 01:12:37 Here's chapter two, here's core ideas for the visuals in chapter two.
1223. 01:12:40 And then I link all of the chapters together in their parts.
1224. 01:12:43 And I explain how we transition from one chapter, one chapter to the next.
1225. 01:12:47 I wish I could show it easily to everybody
1226. 01:12:50 that's listening, anyhow, because it just resonated with me.
1227. 01:12:54 Like this fits so much better with me.
1228. 01:12:57 It's not text-based notes.
1229. 01:12:59 It's not a mind map, which is still in my world, mainly text-based.
1230. 01:13:04 These ideas just kind of popped off the page to me and it in even like as we're
1231. 01:13:09 doing the show and I'm reviewing my notes and like talking about it, it just feels
1232. 01:13:13 so much better.
1233. 01:13:13 It feels so much more natural.
1234. 01:13:15 Text now becomes when I can't figure out a way to visualize it or when there is
1235. 01:13:22 no good visual for it, that's what text becomes as opposed to the default of what
1236. 01:13:26 I've been doing it, where it's just just throw a paragraph of text in there.
1237. 01:13:29 Just throw a paragraph of text in there.
1238. 01:13:30 So this works with me.
1239. 01:13:32 Again, check, yay, yay, jolt, I'm in.
1240. 01:13:36 Yeah, so a couple of things I want to address.
1241. 01:13:40 The the and then or but therefore that you were kind of talking about.
1242. 01:13:47 That's kind of like the elements of good storytelling.
1243. 01:13:51 And I think that's a really powerful idea.
1244. 01:13:56 Again, there are books written on
1245. 01:13:58 it's telling better stories, which I think we've read one at least.
1246. 01:14:03 Maybe we come back to that that topic at some point, but I think I wanted to share
1247. 01:14:08 something that I think is actually a really cool way to start practicing this.
1248. 01:14:12 Are you familiar with Rory's Story Cubes?
1249. 01:14:16 I am familiar with Rory's Story Cubes.
1250. 01:14:18 We have some of those at the house.
1251. 01:14:20 Yeah, so they're basically these dice that you roll and then you get the pictures
1252. 01:14:24 and you tell a story and if you just sit down and roll them yourself as a single
1253. 01:14:30 player and tell a story, it's very easy to just and then and then.
1254. 01:14:36 But when you are one of the things we do with our one on ones, sometimes my kids
1255. 01:14:41 will bring these and we'll we'll tell a story which tell our own version of story.
1256. 01:14:45 Then we'll do one together where we roll the dice and you pick one of the dice
1257. 01:14:49 and you tell the next part of the story.
1258. 01:14:51 And when you have to go back and forth like that, that's when you realize
1259. 01:14:54 you just keep saying and it gets boring, but when you like take it in unexpected
1260. 01:14:58 directions, some pretty hilarious stuff happens.
1261. 01:15:02 So these are pretty cool.
1262. 01:15:04 If you want to get better at storytelling and you just want or if you just want
1263. 01:15:08 something fun to do with your kids, this is this cool and they have a bunch of
1264. 01:15:12 different sets. They got like the basic ones.
1265. 01:15:13 They've got a Harry Potter one, they've got a Star Wars one.
1266. 01:15:16 So you can incorporate, you know, different different characters into it.
1267. 01:15:20 But yeah, it's it's pretty cool.
1268. 01:15:22 In terms of the the storyboards themselves, I don't know that I really want to do
1269. 01:15:29 anything with this again, like there's there's a couple of things that are useful
1270. 01:15:35 here, but get your formula out of my face.
1271. 01:15:40 I mean, that's valid.
1272. 01:15:41 I like the take a stand, put a bold personal claim in your story.
1273. 01:15:45 But I've learned that just from publishing enough stuff on the the internet.
1274. 01:15:50 And the three different modes that he talks about there, I think are powerful.
1275. 01:15:54 The ethos, the authority, that's when you're talking about, yeah, you're talking
1276. 01:15:58 through authority or expert opinion.
1277. 01:16:00 Pathos is emotion or storytelling and logos is that the logic.
1278. 01:16:04 I think those are those are like nice to know ways that you can tell your story.
1279. 01:16:09 But I don't think that you're checking a box somewhere.
1280. 01:16:12 I'm in this mode now.
1281. 01:16:14 It's just, you know, helping you see that storytelling is multifaceted if you're not
1282. 01:16:18 familiar with that before.
1283. 01:16:21 But I will push back a little bit here and say that maybe, you know, the visual
1284. 01:16:26 stuff is the thing that actually frees you to think certain ways in in a way that
1285. 01:16:32 text has not been able to don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
1286. 01:16:36 There is value in learning to communicate your ideas via text.
1287. 01:16:40 And you could argue that a lot of the stuff that I create is visual first.
1288. 01:16:44 My primary social media platform is YouTube.
1289. 01:16:47 I create video courses.
1290. 01:16:49 We now do video podcasts, totally different than I'm going to sit down and I'm going
1291. 01:16:55 to write this article.
1292. 01:16:56 However, having published thousands of podcast episodes, having made probably
1293. 01:17:04 thousands of videos for video courses, I can tell you the basis of everything,
1294. 01:17:10 even though I am a visual person is writing.
1295. 01:17:15 I mean, he wrote a book, he did write a book.
1296. 01:17:18 He made videos first, probably, because there's a lot of video resources here.
1297. 01:17:22 And he does have a workshop, which I think I might have signed up for at one point
1298. 01:17:27 because I have access to this explain ideas visually community that I think he runs.
1299. 01:17:34 But I haven't.
1300. 01:17:36 I honestly, if I did sign up for it, I got busy and I never actually went through
1301. 01:17:41 any of the materials like, oh, that's actually a cool idea.
1302. 01:17:43 I should explore that and then it wasn't until Corey forced me to read a book
1303. 01:17:47 before recording a podcast that I actually did it.
1304. 01:17:49 So it is what it is.
1305. 01:17:51 It is what it is.
1306. 01:17:52 It is what it is.
1307. 01:17:53 All right.
1308. 01:17:54 So now we're going to go into chapter 11, which is flip the habit and free the genie.
1309. 01:17:58 I did not resonate with this one all that much, Mike.
1310. 01:18:01 Like I this this chapter, he's basically saying sketch first, right?
1311. 01:18:05 Second, that knowledge is a genie.
1312. 01:18:08 And when we only use text, we we trap it in a bottle and that this whole
1313. 01:18:13 process that he's been describing to us unleashes the genie and basically allows
1314. 01:18:18 us to develop this more advanced knowledge system.
1315. 01:18:21 He has a figure in here that's a shift from visual thinking as a tool to as a system.
1316. 01:18:27 I agree with that.
1317. 01:18:28 That concept makes sense to me is instead of just doing a sketch note for the sake
1318. 01:18:32 of the sketch note, do the sketch note as a piece, a Lego piece of another puzzle
1319. 01:18:37 or do icons as a Lego piece of another puzzle.
1320. 01:18:39 I'm I'm on board with that.
1321. 01:18:40 I think he tries to round out the book by saying like, this is I don't I don't
1322. 01:18:48 like the reference to unleashing the genie out of the bottle.
1323. 01:18:51 Like it's going to be magic.
1324. 01:18:52 You're going to do these visualizations and all the sudden magic is just going to
1325. 01:18:56 start to flow out of you.
1326. 01:18:57 I still think it's going to be a lot of work and I can tell you from having done it.
1327. 01:19:00 It's a boatload of work like it.
1328. 01:19:02 It's not anything easy.
1329. 01:19:04 I can also tell you, though, that like I find joy in the process and it actually
1330. 01:19:09 helped me connect ideas.
1331. 01:19:10 So that's valuable.
1332. 01:19:12 Will that last?
1333. 01:19:13 How will that last when I think about it in the context of everything?
1334. 01:19:17 Like my ideal would be to do all of the bookworm books that we've ever read
1335. 01:19:22 and try to make connections between all of the bookworm books that we've ever
1336. 01:19:26 that we've ever read and see how that would go.
1337. 01:19:28 That is a ton of work, though.
1338. 01:19:31 And it's like, am I going to get enough out of the amount of hours I would have
1339. 01:19:34 to put into that?
1340. 01:19:35 So I mean, that's he calls he talks about a living knowledge system beyond the single
1341. 01:19:40 stretch, atomic visual notes, and then think in space or like the three core
1342. 01:19:43 ideas that he has behind that.
1343. 01:19:45 So I mean, I could chapter 11, it's OK.
1344. 01:19:48 I get his point, but I could give or take it.
1345. 01:19:50 So let's just pull on that thread a little bit more.
1346. 01:19:54 OK, so let's assume that you have unlimited time and unlimited resources to
1347. 01:20:00 create this visual zetal custom of all of the books that we've read.
1348. 01:20:06 Do you even have clarity on the path forward to like, how do you even start
1349. 01:20:09 that?
1350. 01:20:10 Oh, absolutely.
1351. 01:20:11 Yeah, I know I know what I'm doing.
1352. 01:20:12 OK, so how do you connect something from atomic habits with something from tiny habits?
1353. 01:20:19 OK, so the first thing I have to do is I have to get all of the core ideas from
1354. 01:20:22 atomic habits down as visual atomic notes.
1355. 01:20:25 Yeah.
1356. 01:20:25 So I need to get all those down, right?
1357. 01:20:27 Then the thing I would do is I would start at the most general level when I would
1358. 01:20:32 say bookworm books and I would create, I don't know if he wants to call it an
1359. 01:20:36 idea mixer board or an idea integration board or whatever, like, I don't really care
1360. 01:20:40 what it is, but it would be a blank canvas.
1361. 01:20:42 And I would say, OK, what's the idea that's popping out of my head?
1362. 01:20:45 And this is where I like his idea in his framing of the concept of emergence.
1363. 01:20:50 What's popping out for me?
1364. 01:20:51 OK, it's probably the most recent thing we've read.
1365. 01:20:54 So therefore, those things are going to pop in.
1366. 01:20:56 I'm going to say, this is a cool idea.
1367. 01:20:57 This is a cool idea.
1368. 01:20:57 And then I'm immediately going to say, how does this link to other things?
1369. 01:21:01 Oh, well, this idea links to this other idea over here.
1370. 01:21:05 I'll give you an example.
1371. 01:21:06 So I'm side note has nothing to do with bookworm, just has to do with personal
1372. 01:21:11 discipline December.
1373. 01:21:13 I'm trying to be more disciplined human when it comes to certain areas of my life.
1374. 01:21:17 So discipline December, the first place I go to, and this is actually what got me
1375. 01:21:21 started on, this actually might resonate with me, is Jocko Willink's discipline
1376. 01:21:25 is freedom.
1377. 01:21:26 OK, well, that links also to Ryan Holliday's discipline is destiny.
1378. 01:21:31 Right. And then that also links to toxic grit where she talks about discipline.
1379. 01:21:37 So like, and that was me thinking for like maybe two minutes about like all
1380. 01:21:42 these different things coming together.
1381. 01:21:43 No, I didn't have the visuals developed for it, but I've since developed a visual
1382. 01:21:47 for discipline is is freedom.
1383. 01:21:50 And you know, like, so that's how this stuff comes together to me.
1384. 01:21:53 And I think it's like just intentional sessions that are idea integration
1385. 01:21:58 or storyboarding sessions or whatever it might be.
1386. 01:22:01 And you just let it emerge as it as it flows out.
1387. 01:22:04 Like that's that's how I think I would use this if I was if I was going to do
1388. 01:22:08 this more intense.
1389. 01:22:10 Yeah, see, that's the thing that feels like
1390. 01:22:13 quite the hill to climb because I'm exporting the mind map.
1391. 01:22:18 I'm bringing it in as text.
1392. 01:22:19 I'm going through and I'm saying, is any of this worthy of being its own separate
1393. 01:22:24 idea? You know what I do when something is I highlight the text, bang, bang,
1394. 01:22:28 double brackets, and it's done.
1395. 01:22:31 I don't have to do anything else with that.
1396. 01:22:34 Eventually, I can go open that note if I discover it again and I can use the
1397. 01:22:38 unlinked mentions, I can see the places that it connects.
1398. 01:22:40 So I think for me, going back to the idea of the 40s at Alkosten,
1399. 01:22:46 I am getting the benefit of the fourth dimension without the friction of the fourth
1400. 01:22:51 dimension in a lot of ways.
1401. 01:22:52 And that is not because I am anti visual as we have described.
1402. 01:22:56 Very visual, just using it complimentary as opposed to everything's going to be
1403. 01:23:02 built off of these these visuals.
1404. 01:23:04 And that's the that's the part that that's hard for me.
1405. 01:23:07 I actually liked the idea of he talks about embracing the messiness.
1406. 01:23:12 He talks about becoming an ambidextrous thinker.
1407. 01:23:15 So thinking, you know, being able to switch back and forth between the mediums.
1408. 01:23:18 And I agree with him 100 percent that visual thinking is your original interface.
1409. 01:23:23 So like, I want to defend him a little bit here with how he ends this book.
1410. 01:23:27 I actually think this is pretty, pretty strong, but the takeaway for me is not
1411. 01:23:33 build a visual as Alkosten.
1412. 01:23:35 It's use visual thinking as part of your idea development process, which again,
1413. 01:23:41 I've been actively thinking about how do I do that for years?
1414. 01:23:45 And I've kind of I guess turned into old man yells at cloud at this point
1415. 01:23:50 with the things that work for me.
1416. 01:23:53 Well, I don't think you're there.
1417. 01:23:55 I think I think for someone like you who has an established system that's
1418. 01:23:59 working and you're developing creative content from that system and whatever
1419. 01:24:03 other content you want to make, it's all it's a bigger ask than it is for me who
1420. 01:24:09 hasn't like I don't have these robust patterns yet.
1421. 01:24:13 I don't have these paths in the in the road that I'm already traveling in.
1422. 01:24:17 I'm still figuring out what those paths are.
1423. 01:24:19 It's an easier ask for me.
1424. 01:24:21 And it's one that resonates with me in an interesting way.
1425. 01:24:24 So that's that's a good thing.
1426. 01:24:26 I don't think this is bad at all, honestly.
1427. 01:24:28 Nice.
1428. 01:24:29 Yeah, OK, so he has two additional things thinking in stereo.
1429. 01:24:34 The day I miss my father's birthday and then epilogue.
1430. 01:24:36 I'm going to lump these two together just to round out the book.
1431. 01:24:39 The thing in stereo is basically his dad throws an idea at him and he's like,
1432. 01:24:43 why does it have to be boat or why does it have to be one or the other?
1433. 01:24:45 Why can't it be both?
1434. 01:24:46 And then that's where he got the spark to go, Oh, front is visual.
1435. 01:24:51 Back is, you know, text, the idea and all that stuff.
1436. 01:24:54 So there's a cool story, a good story.
1437. 01:24:56 The epilogue is basically him describing like, I used AI to write this book and I
1438. 01:25:00 wrote it in six weeks.
1439. 01:25:01 And, you know, here are all these ideas that came around with it.
1440. 01:25:04 Overall, I don't think it really ties that much into the visual thinking process
1441. 01:25:09 or system that he he develops for us, but it was cool.
1442. 01:25:12 It was good to get to know him a little.
1443. 01:25:13 Dude, this is the best part of the book right here.
1444. 01:25:15 What he says regarding AI is spot on.
1445. 01:25:19 More people need to talk like this about AI.
1446. 01:25:24 So the epilogue is really the thing that I jotted down in the notes and I agree
1447. 01:25:28 with him that identity is ecstatic thinking and thinking in space, not thinking
1448. 01:25:33 space, not just in lines, but a couple of things that he talks about with AI,
1449. 01:25:37 which are worth calling out here is that AI number one cannot fix unclear thinking.
1450. 01:25:43 And that is a justification and a reason for figuring out how you are going to be
1451. 01:25:49 an ambidextrous thinker using both text-based and visual thinking methods.
1452. 01:25:54 He also talks about how AI thrives on iteration.
1453. 01:25:57 I think it was his mom, maybe who was talking about.
1454. 01:26:01 Can you imagine if you would have had to write this book back in the day with a cool pen?
1455. 01:26:05 There were no revisions.
1456. 01:26:07 You wrote the thing and it was done prior to the printing press, right?
1457. 01:26:11 And then the other thing is that your voice demands your input.
1458. 01:26:14 So you got to create something.
1459. 01:26:16 There has to be an output of what what you've collected here.
1460. 01:26:20 So I think, you know, this is obviously a
1461. 01:26:23 a footnote on the main idea of the book, but this section
1462. 01:26:30 just further solidifies that I like this guy.
1463. 01:26:34 We think about these things the same way.
1464. 01:26:36 You might have just hit on something that I would have never gotten if we didn't
1465. 01:26:40 have this conversation.
1466. 01:26:41 You have to create something.
1467. 01:26:43 The visual thing is the creation that I need to like that is the that is why it's
1468. 01:26:50 worth pushing the boulder up that hill.
1469. 01:26:52 That is why it's worth doing that thing and taking the time to do it.
1470. 01:26:55 And then what does that look like?
1471. 01:26:57 So I don't create for a living in terms of like you do, you know?
1472. 01:27:01 So this creation thing gets me.
1473. 01:27:04 We discussed this earlier.
1474. 01:27:05 You get to create.
1475. 01:27:06 I have to create exactly.
1476. 01:27:08 Like I so I create now the the real question is if I want to become a creator,
1477. 01:27:13 like a full-time creator, would this get in the way of me doing that?
1478. 01:27:17 Am I spending too much time on creating these visuals and not creating the things
1479. 01:27:20 that I need to create as a creator?
1480. 01:27:22 So that's that's an interesting, interesting thought that I would have never
1481. 01:27:27 had on my own.
1482. 01:27:29 Nice.
1483. 01:27:29 All right, Mike, are you ready to go to action items?
1484. 01:27:32 Are you ready to go to action items?
1485. 01:27:34 Oh, I am ready to go to action items.
1486. 01:27:35 Or because I'm going to just slide over here on the place on my board.
1487. 01:27:39 Remember my board that I've created for this book.
1488. 01:27:42 And so they're not in our notes, but they're on this board right here.
1489. 01:27:46 So I had three.
1490. 01:27:49 Create a visual visual PKM for the sketch your mind book.
1491. 01:27:57 Idea board.
1492. 01:27:57 I don't know what you call it.
1493. 01:27:58 Idea integration board, whatever you want to call it, or a storyboard.
1494. 01:28:01 I did that.
1495. 01:28:02 Yeah, I'm super happy with that.
1496. 01:28:04 So I've got an action item that's already done.
1497. 01:28:07 It took some hours, though, like without a doubt, like it took time, but it was it was worth it.
1498. 01:28:13 The next one is create one for the storyline Institute, which is the seminary thing that I'm doing.
1499. 01:28:18 I'm working through that right now, but that is much more of a slow burn.
1500. 01:28:22 Like I'm going to build that one probably for the rest of my life, assuming I continue
1501. 01:28:27 to do visual these visual things.
1502. 01:28:29 So I'm playing around with that one.
1503. 01:28:30 So that that's number two.
1504. 01:28:32 And then the third one is develop my enduring questions, which I've started to write
1505. 01:28:37 those down.
1506. 01:28:38 I want to continue to refine those.
1507. 01:28:40 So I've got some ideas for those.
1508. 01:28:41 I want to refine those and then what I'd love to do is compare those to like true
1509. 01:28:44 north and some of the other things I've done core values and how to do those things
1510. 01:28:48 all match up and line up, but I'm not going to commit to that.
1511. 01:28:52 So those are my three.
1512. 01:28:53 You have three here as well.
1513. 01:28:54 What are your three?
1514. 01:28:55 Yeah, so mine is to check out sublime as an idea.
1515. 01:29:01 Shoot, IIB. What the heck does that mean?
1516. 01:29:03 Integration board.
1517. 01:29:04 I do integration board.
1518. 01:29:06 Yep.
1519. 01:29:06 And spoiler alert, I've kind of already done this.
1520. 01:29:09 I did a screencast online module on sublime because I started when I heard
1521. 01:29:13 about it on how I write how I write podcasts, I started playing around with it.
1522. 01:29:17 I'm like, this is really cool.
1523. 01:29:18 This is the ideal version of this stuff for me.
1524. 01:29:21 So I'm going to continue to play with that.
1525. 01:29:24 Hopefully publish something as a result of experimenting on sublime.
1526. 01:29:28 I'm also going to create queries inside of obsidian for the different emoji icons.
1527. 01:29:32 If I can, I got to figure out that system.
1528. 01:29:35 And I am going to check out this workshop.
1529. 01:29:36 I want to dive deeper into these concepts.
1530. 01:29:40 I feel like this book scratched the surface, but there's so much more.
1531. 01:29:45 And I have no doubt that.
1532. 01:29:48 Jolt.
1533. 01:29:49 There you go.
1534. 01:29:50 As it's every time I say it, I feel like I'm going to say it wrong every time.
1535. 01:29:54 Has really studied this stuff and has 10 to a hundred times more material on this
1536. 01:30:01 topic than is in this book.
1537. 01:30:04 Just go to his Visual Thinking YouTube channel.
1538. 01:30:06 It's just I went to Excaladra.
1539. 01:30:08 He's got a whole bunch of reference videos in the description for the plugin.
1540. 01:30:12 They're all broken out into these categories and a lot of them are just
1541. 01:30:15 visual thinking stuff.
1542. 01:30:16 There's hundreds of videos there.
1543. 01:30:18 Yeah, I haven't had the chance to look at them yet, but I'm going to explore that.
1544. 01:30:22 He has gone wild on this.
1545. 01:30:23 It's actually really it's really interesting if it resonates and it clicks with you.
1546. 01:30:27 But he's done like 15 versions of the workshop.
1547. 01:30:30 So at this point, I'm sure that's like really dialed in.
1548. 01:30:33 I would love to see what that looks like.
1549. 01:30:35 You won't be surprised if you go to the website.
1550. 01:30:37 It's got a big visual that tells you everything he does in the works.
1551. 01:30:40 What do you know?
1552. 01:30:43 All right, we got to go to style and rating.
1553. 01:30:44 So I Mike, this is not I'm not going to take very long here.
1554. 01:30:48 It is a five star book for me.
1555. 01:30:50 Hands down without a doubt, five star book, boom, done.
1556. 01:30:54 I'm not even going to say anymore.
1557. 01:30:55 I like the book.
1558. 01:30:56 I think the concepts resonate five stars.
1559. 01:31:00 OK, well, you're going to make me take longer because I'm not going to give it five
1560. 01:31:03 stars. I will give it four stars.
1561. 01:31:06 To be honest, I found myself resisting this book a lot as I was reading it for
1562. 01:31:10 reasons shared in the in the podcast.
1563. 01:31:14 I thought I was going to crank through this so quick, but the way that the stuff
1564. 01:31:18 presented, I had to wrestle with it quite a bit and I've drawn different conclusions.
1565. 01:31:23 I'm not going to say he's wrong with a different lot of different things.
1566. 01:31:26 As I mentioned, I feel like he and I are cut from the same cloth.
1567. 01:31:30 We would have a great time if we ever got to sit down and chat.
1568. 01:31:33 That being said, like the way that he framed things just didn't quite click for me.
1569. 01:31:38 But I think the larger points that he's making are extremely valid.
1570. 01:31:43 Agreed.
1571. 01:31:43 I would recommend that people who are particularly interested in developing
1572. 01:31:49 their ideas, they want to be more productive or creative or they're interested
1573. 01:31:53 in personal knowledge management in general.
1574. 01:31:55 This is a good book.
1575. 01:31:57 I would just recommend that people as they pick this one up do not go into it,
1576. 01:32:02 assuming that the system that is going to be presented is one that you should be
1577. 01:32:08 following verbatim, if it clicks great, you're excited about it.
1578. 01:32:12 I mean, ultimately follow the energy.
1579. 01:32:15 But if you if you talk about idea
1580. 01:32:17 integration boards and you're like, then just skip that part.
1581. 01:32:21 I agreed, I agreed.
1582. 01:32:23 Like my my version of that is I don't need to I don't feel need the need to make
1583. 01:32:28 all of my own icons.
1584. 01:32:30 So I'm not going to hand draw on my own icons.
1585. 01:32:32 I'm going to go figure out what is the one that captures the idea I have and then
1586. 01:32:35 import it into as an icon in for me.
1587. 01:32:38 So that's my version of that.
1588. 01:32:40 OK, so Mike, let's put sketch your mind on the shelf.
1589. 01:32:43 What's next?
1590. 01:32:45 Next, we are going to convince Corey once and for all that analog is better.
1591. 01:32:51 And we are going to read the "Prowst and the Squid" by Marianne Wolf.
1592. 01:32:55 It's never going to happen, but OK, I'll read "Prowst and the Squid," but I'm not
1593. 01:33:00 going to read the analog books consistently, but we'll give it a shot, right?
1594. 01:33:03 We'll give it a shot.
1595. 01:33:04 All right, fair enough.
1596. 01:33:06 What's after that?
1597. 01:33:07 After that is going to be "Hacking the Human Mind" by Richard
1598. 01:33:11 Shotten and Michael Aaron Flicker.
1599. 01:33:15 All righty.
1600. 01:33:16 Mike, do you have any gap books between now and our next?
1601. 01:33:19 I do.
1602. 01:33:20 I have required reading as a gap book because we are going to be talking to an
1603. 01:33:26 author who has a book coming out for the Focus podcast.
1604. 01:33:31 That author is my friend Chris Bailey and he has sent me his new book, Intentional,
1605. 01:33:36 to Finish What You Start.
1606. 01:33:38 So I must finish this before we interview him.
1607. 01:33:41 Well, I guess I don't have to, but that's the way I'm wired.
1608. 01:33:44 I'm going to read the whole book before we talk to him a couple of weeks.
1609. 01:33:48 It's going to be out early January for people who are interested in this one.
1610. 01:33:52 You know what?
1611. 01:33:53 Let's do Chris a solid.
1612. 01:33:55 Let's all go pre-order intentional.
1613. 01:33:58 OK, I helped him with the the course that he put together, which is sort of
1614. 01:34:02 complementary to this. And so I know a lot of the ideas that he's going to talk
1615. 01:34:08 about in this book and some of the frameworks that he he talked about in that
1616. 01:34:11 course are fundamental to this book.
1617. 01:34:14 I haven't read this book yet, but I highly expect that this will be the best book
1618. 01:34:20 that he has written to date.
1619. 01:34:22 OK, there's a there's a good words.
1620. 01:34:26 There's a good words.
1621. 01:34:28 I don't have any gap books.
1622. 01:34:29 I'm not going to have any gap books.
1623. 01:34:31 At the end of the semester, we are in the last week of the semester.
1624. 01:34:33 I'm not taking it on anything.
1625. 01:34:35 Will I probably listen to something?
1626. 01:34:38 It's not reading.
1627. 01:34:39 It's not reading.
1628. 01:34:40 Let's be real.
1629. 01:34:41 Well, I will I probably listen to something?
1630. 01:34:43 Yes, by the way, I just every time I say that I get feedback and I understand
1631. 01:34:48 like people some people have to read audiobooks.
1632. 01:34:52 Do what do what you got to do if you've got a chance to scan your eyes down the
1633. 01:34:57 page, you're going to retain more information that way.
1634. 01:35:00 I agree, I agree completely, but I don't have any gap books.
1635. 01:35:03 So I just want to say thank you to everybody for listening.
1636. 01:35:07 If you're interested, we have a pro show.
1637. 01:35:09 You can get longer ad-free pro show for the episode.
1638. 01:35:14 It's about today was about 15 minutes.
1639. 01:35:16 We talked about our holiday gift ideas.
1640. 01:35:18 There's a bootleg that's released more quickly.
1641. 01:35:20 It's about a week or two early.
1642. 01:35:21 There's a bookworm wallpaper.
1643. 01:35:24 Mike has put his reading masterclass in there for the for the pro members.
1644. 01:35:28 It's $7 a month.
1645. 01:35:30 You can go to patreon.com/bookwormfm and we just appreciate everybody who who does
1646. 01:35:35 that. Everybody's a patreon member and helps us just with all the little costs
1647. 01:35:39 that come up with making the show.
1648. 01:35:41 Absolutely.
1649. 01:35:42 Thank you.
1650. 01:35:43 If you are reading along with us, pick up the
1651. 01:35:45 Prowse and the Squid by Mary Ann Wolf and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.