[Monthly Digest] September 2024
The "back to school" month was dedicated to learning and a book suggestion that could make busy students less overwhelmed.
This month, I discovered many Brussels-based writers at Wordcraft Collective’s event. As is often the case, non-fiction writers appear to be a minority, so I knew most of my writing would not move the needle for them. So, I picked the most relevant piece of content I could find in my vault for the open mic part, the one about the current book crisis.
This choice was also influenced by this event’s first workshop dedicated to compelling storytelling. Once more, I was the odd one among the nodding audience of wannabe writers (including myself) fed the usual tried-and-true canned success formulas. Those are precisely the reasons we keep reading more of the same cheesy books with lookalike covers placed for us front and centre in organic coffee-smelling hipster bookstores by a handful of tastemakers who perpetuate The Beatles’ verse A → verse B → Chorus → Verse C → Chorus → Chorus → Outro formula. How many carbon copies do we need?
The image below is me publically getting things off my chest.
The long-running topic of learning a foreign language as an engineer expectedly overspilled to another month. Armed with the basics described in August, we could finally expand to more complex paradigms of memorisation of new information, such as encoding.
This episode dissects a simple Chinese greeting, forever cementing it in your memories thanks to engineering encoding techniques.
The last part of the most extended series of learning foreign languages as an engineer showcases the personal knowledge vault I used to learn Mandarin Chinese. In this final episode, I’m letting you into the encoding notes I carefully created for myself and will happily share with those interested.
Every month appears to be longer than the previous one. This illusory perception of time is a function of how eventful a period is. As kids, we feel it’s moving at an excruciatingly slow pace. As time passes and your calendar becomes a long sausage of constantly overlapping activities, you wish someone could throw in a few extra hours you desperately need to deal with an evergrowing backlog of responsibilities.
Perhaps
’s upcoming book will shed some light on how to deal with the problem above since its central promise is to answer the question, “How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.” I sure would love to get that question answered.I also noticed that many PKM fans are also very interested in productivity. I’m sure Google and Amazon algorithms routinely recommend books such as “Getting Things Done,” “Agile Productivity,” or any of Cal Newport’s “quit social media” instalments. Soon, it might also start recommending “Tiny Experiments”.
And this is our month of September, knowledge engineers.
If you or your kids return to school this month, I hope you’ll give some of this month’s content a real chance. Do share your genuine sentiments with the community by commenting.
See you next month.