[Monthly Digest] March 2024

March 2024 publication wrap-up and a few thoughts on the quality of modern books.

Here are a few books I’ll always recommend.

Happy end of the first quarter of 2024, knowledge engineers. As always, we’re wrapping up the month with a digest sprinkled with a few retrospective reflections.

This time, I’d like to share my sentiments on what might be wrong with modern books. I'm not making generalizations; I'm just making some observations based on a relatively small sample of data. Still…

---

David Perell from the “How I Write” podcast recently shared a LinkedIn post in which he claims that one should spread the message in video form if the goal is to appeal to the masses, but intelligent people read books. Although that felt comforting, I’m not sure I can fully relate. A few recent events led me to doubt David’s claim.

The first is a series of books I’ve read, one after the other, that were so short and bad that I wanted to file a warranty claim for lost hours of life. I generally refrain from spreading hate online, but in one particular instance, I felt it was my duty to prevent others from wasting their precious time. The final nail in the coffin was that this book was, mind you, from the writer’s help category. Given its quality, it simply couldn’t be called any worse. So, I left my honest Goodreads review of “How To Not SUCK At Writing Your First Book”.

Since we’re on the topic of Goodreads, I plan to praise and highlight certain books I read there from now on, so follow me there, and those thoughts will reach you, too, hopefully sparing you the agony.

The second “incident” that prompted me to vent here today is my frustration after being tricked into someone’s sales funnel with a promise of downloading 13(!!!) books on a topic I have a particular affinity with. And so I did, only to discover that each book was THREE pages long. To add insult to injury, the ratio of pictures to low-quality text was about 80%. I know we’re living in a time of short attention spans, but this?

So, if smart people read books, those books would be smart. If they were smart books, they would need to be written by smart writers. Yet, as Peter Thiel famously said:

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

On the bright side, I also read quite a few high-quality books. My review of Kory Stamper’s “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries” attests that there are still keepers. Again, let’s unite on GoodReads for collective vetting.

But, as the founder of Vanguard Group, John Clifton "Jack" Bogle, famously said:

You have to be long.

So, just keep reading. I suggest you begin with a few things listed below.

---

Analog vs Digital

The technological leap forward in the Tools for Thought (TfT) class is hard to argue with. Yet, many still opt for the analogue. Why is that? And is it even the right question to ask?

---

[Upcoming Event] PKM Summit in Utrecht, Netherlands

European knowledge engineers were blessed with the first PKM summit in Utrecht this month. A great many essential folks were on the speaker rooster. This article was published before the event but remains relevant post-factum, too.

Tiago Forte

,

Nick Milo

,

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

,

Gregor B. Rosenauer

,

Ernst-Jan Pfauth

,

Marieke van Vliet

,

Peter Joosten

, and many more. Thank you!

---

A PKM Tool From the '90s

Nothing has ever been invented. Everything old is new again. Everything is a remix of everything else. The only constant is that human beings like order. We feel uneasy if we can’t connect the dots and explain things. In other words, we’ve been PKMing for as long as we’ve existed and done that in the ‘90s.

---

[Book Review] The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information

A filing cabinet is an unsung hero of knowledge management. It underwent an evolution and enabled new Tools for Thought. This is my review of, arguably, one of the best books on the topic.

---

And that’s our March 2024, knowledge engineers.

Many exciting things happened behind the curtains this month, but it’s too early to mention them. Suffice it to say that you never fail to surprise me. I knew little about the hidden potential of those reading this newsletter and was extraverted enough to reach out. If you haven’t done so yet, please do. So far, all of these conversations ended up in something extraordinary.

I love the idea that, despite thousands of kilometres of internet wires between us, we have morning coffee together every Sunday and motivate one another to Get Things Done (GTD) and smarter in the process.