🖋️ By Steven Johnson
🎧 I listened the audiobook. Worse than reading, but better than nothing!
These are summary notes of surprising information, written so I can better remember what I read.
The book in 3 sentences
- Good ideas start as hunches. And they’re much better when connected to other ppl and their hunches. A good hunch not shared might remain a hunch.
- The Commonplace book: the concept of keeping notes on any topic of curiosity, and the act of writing it will help develop it and connect to your other hunches.
- I’m writing a program to automatically enrich my notes: keyword extraction to search Google knowledge graph, find related Wikipedia articles, and generate synonyms and antonyms and add this to plain text in the bottom of each note; this will make my ideas more susceptible to search and connection.
Top quotes
Bill Gate’s reading sabaticals fostered many more connections between what he learned because of the proximit in time. You can really GRONK a subject by reading 5 books about it simultaniously. That’s much more valuable and actionable than 1 book a month of 5 months. Proximity in time → more connections.
More connections = more valuable hunches.
“Take the atoms off the wall and put them in motion.” When you take it out of the lab, and move it around, that creates new connections too.
Kastan Day 