Hello there, friend!

after 560 hours of work, I finally submitted my Master's thesis last Friday, which means that I will very soon be going all in on entrepreneurship, trying to start helping companies move closer to self-management and become places for cultivation of wisdom.

But this week is very much a vacation for me, which is why this letter is reaching you a day late. And it's also why I'll once more skip the essay. But I will at least outline some steps to address these writing lapses – I want to do a comprehensive review of my note-taking and content-creation workflows because at least the newsletter writing is so far quite a "big lift" in Tiago Forte's terminology.

For example, just putting together the excerpts took about 3,5 hours, and there weren't even that many of them. Plus, I'm actually not too happy with the browser podcast excerpt interface – there's no way of adjusting the playback speed, nor of easily adding the whole episode to your queue (that said, if you open the links on your phone and you have the Snipd app, both of these are solved). So I'm thinking of writing brief summaries of the entire episodes, rather than spending time on just the excerpts. Also, I'm still writing the essay in one day (yes, usually the day when I want to send the letter) instead of spreading it out and working on several posts concurrently.

And even though Logseq was definitely a big help in writing the thesis, I'm still very far from an actual Zettelkasten – I don't really feel like my note database is constantly growing in value, because especially the notes I take on podcasts are linked only extremely superficially, through the top-level categories (metawork, entrepreneurship, sense-making, etc.). This then means that I am not reminded of those notes while I'm working on other notes. Perhaps this would largely be fixed if I didn't feel so rushed when writing this and took a bit more time on thinking about and creating those links. So I want to do a big review of how I approached note-taking so far (for thesis, newsletter, and everything else ) and hopefully figure out something more functional, which at the same time wouldn't require inordinate amounts of extra work. Or, if it did, it would be work that could be easily converted into content.

The last point could naturally lead to another aspiration workflow aspiration, which is to figure out a way of integrating more platforms into the whole content process. Ideally, I would turn simpler ideas / individual podcast excerpts into tweets, post essays on Linked In, and record a more conversational read-through with comments as a podcast/youtube video (this is very much inspired by Dan Koe). At the same time, I would need to remain focused, so any extra work would need to have quite a big ROI. Especially the read-throughs would probably be largely a waste of effort, but maybe I would get new insights through them, or I could listen to them myself to improve my writing, so I might still give them a try.

I'll keep you posted on any discoveries I make!

Last week’s dig-ups

Collective metawork

• Jabe Bloom on Boundaryless Conversations:

  • The way to adapt to complexity is through cosmopolitan localism – enabling the self-governance of localities while recognizing their interdependence with a broader system, whose purpose is not to govern the localities but to facilitate their self-determination. For this, a platform strategy is required – thinking in terms of conditions and constraints, not simply imposing the firm's will on the world. In other words, adopting a view that emphasizes participation over manipulation.

  • Digital commons (e.g. platforms) gain value with use, but unlocking it requires the cosmopolitan localism approach to platforming. Platforming is about creation of components and shared value that accelerate the ability to interact and create value in the world.

• Also on Boundaryless Conversations, Alex Osterwalder (the creator of the business model canvas) talked about the portfolio approach to innovation and the need for a mechanism of killing bad projects

Entrepreneurship

• There are 4 different stages of customer awareness, and each of them requires a different approach to marketing: problem aware (needs more information about the problem), solution aware (needs more information about how to solve the problem), product aware (needs more information about how different products offering the solution differ), most aware (ready to buy, needs the final encouragement)

Philosophy & Sense-making

• I recently discovered a great new thinker – Gregg Henriques. His main focus is developing an integrative framework that could overcome the fragmentation of psychology as a field.

  • The Problem of Psychology – as a field, psychology doesn't have an agreement on the object of its study and the key concepts like mind, consciousness, or self. This is as if different branches of biology didn't agree on what a cell is.

  • The Evolution of the Threefold Problem of Justification – when humans started using speech, this also introduced the three problems of justifications for any claim: analytic (is it true), self-interest (how does the justification serve the individual), social interest (how does the justification relate to the interests of others). These three problems then influence the development of ego, self, and culture, as belief systems that reconcile the three problems develop

  • A big part of the problem of psychology is caused by bad incentives – every school of thought is incentivized to emphasize how it's different rather than how it's similar to others, and these incentives even lead to dishonest reporting of experimental results so that the brand isn't endangered

• On a very similar note to the last point, Joscha Bach and John Vervaeke discussed the problem of incentives in science and how they don't promote dialogos & integration

• John Vervaeke and Iain McGilchrist discussed how the calls to live in the present moment are often misinterpreted as encouraging hedonism

• On Your Undivided Attention, Divya Siddarth, co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project, gave an overview of how democracy could become more participatory and deliberative

That’s it for today – let me know what resonated and I’ll see you here next week!

Take care

Chris