Beyond the learning you do when writing the notes, having a backlog of pre-written notes now unlocks numerous additional abilities your traditional notes do not provide.
Avoiding heavy lifts
In a famous segment fitness guru Jack LaLane told his viewers he could lift 1000 pounds, displaying an impressive chest with the numbers emblazoned on it. LaLane then showed the key to his approach. He opened the lid of the chest and took the weight out five pounds at a time.
Today you are approaching most of your projects as heavy lifts. By taking the time to capture the essence of the ideas in your own words as you come across them you have a pre-built model that you can draw on when you find yourself in a need to create.
You can quickly extract and adapt writing you have already done that is written in your style to rapidly create new works. Not only that but the ideas behind those new productions often jump out at you through the relationships between the ideas.
Stand on the shoulders of giants
One concern I know I feel personally is that what you create is just a combination of the ideas you have captured from other places. The reality is no one creates in a vacuum. We are all informed by the information, research, and wisdom that we have encountered before. You add value to those ideas in two ways:
- You come at the concepts with your own unique background and experiences
- You identify relationships between the concepts that are unique to you
Idea Reuse
Once you have put in the effort to craft a note capturing an idea you now already have a piece of writing in your voice to express that idea. Rather than having to hunt back in fully formed outputs for an idea you have discussed before you can start at the source. This allows you to force-multiply the value of the initial effort and create more quickly.
One of the most difficult parts of creation is determining a direction and taking the first steps. By analyzing the relationships between your notes and leveraging the work you have already done you are no longer required to start from a blank page when creating something new. You have the component parts you can quickly harvest from and adjust.
Navigation
graph LR;
A(Intellectual Craftsmanship)-->B(The Information Framework)
B-->C(Capture)
B-->D(Process)
B-->E(Relate)
B-->F(Create)
style F stroke-width:4px
click A "/posts/intro/"
click B "/posts/info-framework/"
click C "/posts/capture/"
click D "/posts/process/"
click E "/posts/relate/"