After reading a book, I've always had the feeling that I've simultaneously learned a ton of information and immediately forgotten just as much. I wanted a way to actually retain and use the information I was gathering. I started highlighting, collecting quotes and taking notes. Initially, I just stored these inside the book itself, writing a general summary on the front page. Gradually, I tried compiling all of these summaries into a single Google Doc, which grew immensely. This process, however, resulted in what's known as the Collector's Fallacy: the illusion that having a stack of quotes, and notes is the same as having knowledge. It's not. It's just a collection of words. True knowledge lies in how information connects. Context and connections give information its meaning. If you were given a word or even a stack of words from another language with no context or connection to any other words, it would be meaningless. But once that word is placed in its context and given connections to your vocabulary, the meaning emerges and the word becomes usable.

In my effort to avoid the Collector's Fallacy, I stumbled upon the Zettelkasten system. It is a bottom-up method of note-taking that consists of atomic notes, called zettels. Each zettel contains just one piece of information and connects to at least one other zettel. There is no folder system or top-down structure; everything lives in a flat vault. My initial reaction was that this was just another way to hoard information. But as I slowly realized over the years, with many run-ins with the Collector's Fallacy, is that the simple rules of atomic notes and individual connections create an emergent structure of knowledge. As notes are added, they concentrate around particular concepts, allowing knowledge to form naturally. Eventually, these clusters can be mined to form Maps of Content (MOCs) that translate the web of ideas into a linear format which can be communicated in a conversation, blog post, or book.

This process has enabled me to fully indulge in my bubbling curiosity about the world. My brain flows in many different directions at once, and trying to force a top-down structure on those interests is incredibly overwhelming. The Zettelkasten allows me to follow all those strands simultaneously. It prevents the ever present decision paralysis regarding where an idea "belongs," freeing my unbounded interests.

In that vein, this newsletter will be the next step in my knowledge journey: the harvest. Every issue will focus on 3-5 connected zettels from my vault and be kept strictly under 500 words. Follow along to see how these connections emerge. These posts will have no overarching destination: the jumps between ideas may be direct and obvious or large and non-linear. But all of it will be driven from a baseline of pure curiosity.