4 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2022
  2. Jun 2022
    1. the time you sit down tomake progress on something, all the work to gather and organize thesource material needs to already be done. We can’t expectourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. Ilearned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine thatsystematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of ourawareness.

      By writing down and collecting ideas slowly over time, working on them in small fits and spurts, when one finally comes to do the final work on their writing project or other work, the pieces only need minor shaping to take their final form. This process allows for a much greater level of serendipity, creativity, and potential sustained genius of connecting ideas across time to take shape in a final piece.


      How does this relate to diffuse thinking? How can slow diffuse thinking be leveraged into this process?

      Writing down fleeting notes while walking around can be valuable as one's ideas brew slowly in the mind (diffuse thinking) in combination with active combinatorial creativity, thus a form of Llullan combinatorial diffusion.


      Many business books seem so shallow and often only have one real insight which is repeated multiple times, perhaps to drive the point home or perhaps just to have enough filler to seem being worth the purchase of a book.

      Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich is an example of this, though it shows a different form of genius in expanding the idea from a variety of perspectives so that eventually everyone will absorb the broader idea which is distilled to great effect into the title.

    1. No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it inwriting. I read once that people who write down their New Year’s resolutions have agreater chance of achieving them than people who don’t. This is the sort of factoidthat is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it shouldbe true.

      This quote from Twyla Tharp seems like another instantiation of Napoleon Hill's mantra "Think and Grow Rich", but is more concrete and literate: "Write and Grow Rich" (or successful, at least.)

  3. Sep 2020
    1. Thus, New Thought thinker Ralph Waldo Trine (not to be confused with Ralph Waldo Emerson) could exhort his readers to “See yourself in a prosperous condition. Affirm that you will before long be in a prosperous condition.”

      This also sounds a bit like the general philosophy behind Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.