Nurturing Notes and Thoughts

Not all ideas are equal. Ideas have different sources, confidence levels, provability and permanence. We use different words to describe our ideas: Hunches, notions, opinions, theories, concepts, abstractions, beliefs, hypothesis, facts, laws. Our thoughts don't stay the same either. Our minds change over time.

If there are all these ways to think about ideas… why do we use the same note-making structure to represent this variety?

This has become the most impactful adaptation to my Creativity System: a simple classification system that has levels of "strength" for an idea. A "weak" idea is subject to doubt and disproval while a "strong" idea is core to my thinking.

There is an argument for only including strong opinions or strong facts in your Creativity System. By this logic every link in your notes is valid and strong. While this is tempting, we still need a place to capture and nurture new ideas. We would be creating a boundary arbitrarily in your Creativity System. However we slice and dice it, we have one Creativity System from inception to output.

Growing Your Notes

Note-making is idea development. To create and discover we must capture new and risky ideas and connections, not just recording the safe and the known. There is great value in capturing unproven thoughts so we can nurture them to maturity.¹

There are many ways to implement notes with a lifecycle, but all such systems should consider:

• allow easy capture of new ideas
• easy identification of the strength of an idea
• clear path for weak ideas to become strong

Capture the Interesting

Our Creativity Systems should support capturing and placing all kinds of notes into their own "home", both weak and strong.

If we restrict our system to strong ideas we limit our ability to capture new and wonderful ideas. A huge part of a Creativity System is to allow us to capture and nuture anything that grabs and holds our interest.

Clear Identification

Our systems should have some sort of way of discerning what is a weak note, and what is a strong note. There are many such ways to do this (I'll detail mine in a later post) but it should make sense to you and be natural to your system and your goals.

Having this sort of identification can help us deal with a subtle but deadly cognitive bias: Humans believe we are critical of new ideas. The cold reality: our minds default to believing all we hear or read. We would like to think that when encountering a new idea we consider its truthfulness before believing… but it is far easier to just accept what we are given. We optionally (and rarely) consider a new idea's truthfulness after our minds have already accepted it.² By encoding new "weak" ideas with a structure that denotes their fragility, we can help ourselves defeat this bias and navigate critically in new areas of thought.

Path to Maturity

Once we have a way to capture all interesting ideas, and a clear way to discern the different kinds of thoughts and notes, we will often find notes traveling up or down the lifecycle. Once all our thoughts and notes are swimming around in the same sea, there are many lovely ways that they can grow, be disproven, or continue to flourish. Just revisiting a note after the passage of time can change its position in our minds.

Sometimes while working I'll find strong surrounding arguments through search or links which will "promote" the idea in my mind.

Sometimes while researching and writing I'll suddenly see a strong opinion that links together lots of weaker facts. The pattern suddenly shifts, and I'll have a new hypothesis to start studying.

There are many ways that allowing weak and strong ideas to co-exist in our notes can improve our thinking. I've started "debate" notes, linked notes arguing either side of a controversy. I've found patterns in my own thinking that were then encoded as a "weak" note, studied, and ultimately rejected because there's no proof.

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In previous versions of my note-taking systems I either restricted my system to only "worthy" or "strong" notes, or I threw everything into the system but without a way to tell what was weak and what was strong. When only strong notes were in my system my thinking never grew, I only reinforced prior thoughts. When all thoughts were un-evaluated it was hard to navigate. By capturing everything while discerning weak and strong thoughts my Creativity System and my creative thinking has benefitted dramatically.