[Monthly Digest] August 2024
Depending on your goals, learning can be both the aim and the byproduct of personal knowledge management. This month we've initiated a discussion about how PKM and engineering tricks can help.
Like learning a foreign language, maintaining a publication like this is a project measured in decades. Therefore, many of the challenges typically associated with the former also apply to the latter. One of them is occasionally dropping off.
“The Mechanics of Knowledge Management” is not my first long-term writing initiative. Before that, there was “Tout ce qui sonne” (“Everything Sounding”), a blog about music, sound, hi-fi and everything closely or remotely related to sound. I handled it like a total amateur and a hopeless perfectionist who’d lick each article so clean that it’d take forever to publish. I was setting the bar too high, turning the artificially set approaching release date into agony. Overestimating the stakes and how much the world cares about the quality of your work is a cognitive bias we all fall into. Egocentricity tricks us into thinking the stakes are higher than they are.
There was also “Tone Singleton Club,” an online educational resource for modern gentlemen, and a satellite for the accessories and grooming e-commerce business attempt. If you're curious, my website still references some of the most popular (and, in hindsight, quite embarrassing) posts. The pompous website’s motto, “Where good men become great”, never fully materialised. Still, it helped me add more writing muscle and the necessary stamina. The publication eventually died out because it was intertwined with the dying startup.
Although I’ve made it a matter of pride not to quit this time, I fully embraced that life will sometimes get in the way. And that’s precisely what happened in August, resulting in a missing weekly issue: I got married.
You’d agree that this is a “good enough” excuse. Then again, I’m certainly overestimating the importance of delivering these letters to you every Sunday morning.
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The topic we’ve been discussing in August is vast; therefore, it will undoubtedly become an epic spanning two months. I encourage you not to classify this series as a language-learning-related patch of this publication. Don’t be fooled by the titles featuring Mandarin Chinese. These issues are still about engineering tricks applicable to knowledge acquisition. However, Chinese is a great case study because it’s not a minor undertaking, and most aspects follow the engineering paradigms discussed this month almost verbatim. Frenchmen say, “Whoever can do more can do less”. If these tricks can help you deal with something as impenetrable as Chinese, you can certainly use these techniques for something more relevant to your learning.
To get to the meat of the topic, I first had to set up the foundations.
“The Onion Layers of Knowledge” introduces the iterative process of collecting and connecting the dots. It describes the associative nature of our brains and how you can and should leverage it to growth-hack your learning. Forewarned is forearmed.
Once we’ve got the basics down, it usually should start making sense why there’s a strategic subset of words to focus on first and how to build richer vocabulary by leveraging what you already know. Chinese is an excellent example of a language with this erector set characteristic.
This part continues building on the first part of the series. It proposes an engineering approach to optimising the speed of knowledge acquisition and hacking conventional limitations based on generic averages.
It’s all about measuring with the proper yardsticks because you can only improve what you can measure.
And this is our month of August, knowledge engineers.
I don’t intend to get married too often, so unless the stress at work and in life becomes unbearable, I should be able to stick to my weekly writing schedule, even if it’s just a bite-sized something you can read through as quickly as you finish your croissant. A weekly micro-improvement is better than no improvement at all.
The best way to show support is to write back or forward “The Mechanics of Knowledge Management” to someone you know.
See you in September.