Knowledge

The top 1% smart thinkers I've observed have all been very clear thinkers. They could elucidate complex thoughts as they understanding the basics, at a very fundamental level. Sure, you could memorize all kinds of complicated concepts and stitch them together, but you will only get so far. And I feel that cleaner thinking is an outcome of deeper reflection — both reflection in action, and...

Strongly recommend everyone to keep private notes about people. These could even be some random jotted keywords: "served in the navy", "capuccino lover", "biker", "loves going on long walks", and so on. When private notes accumulate over time in the form of a database, they start showing emergent properties. As Derek Sivers rightly points out in his essay: having your own database is one of the...

Zettels are the best way to connect and preserve ideas. I've tried various tools and systems for online writing, but nothing beats the power of Zettels. What are they, really? They come from the Zettelkasten method, developed by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who was incredibly prolific. He wrote around 70 books and 400 peer-reviewed articles in 30 years. That's a lot of writing. How did he...

Not starting with a blank slate has been a great productivity boost in my writing. I wrote 50K words in 2024. And I can safely say that these 50K words have been written in a well thought manner, instead of an AI generated word salad. All this, because I've been exploring this neat little plugin called as Smart Connections on Obsidian. It is a tool, and I wouldn't be naive enough to say that...

When you actively hold a question in your mind, you start seeing potential answers and questions related to it pop up in your radar. The question and the answer co-evolve in a gracious dance enriching our understanding of the world and space around us. Questions act as your personal radar. > The textbook definition of a question is a sentence used to seek information. But it feels borderline...