I'm eternally inspired by Visa's memex, a powerful tool that serves as a succinct personal knowledge repository. The memex is a crystallization of not just his main talking points, but his fundamental beliefs and discoveries. By distilling his thoughts into one page, the memex provides a comprehensive snapshot of Visa's two books and reveals who he really is as a thinker.
The process of creating a visual diagram of one's most important ideas is not only an intellectual exercise but also a deeply personal journey. There's a beauty in the pursuit of one's personal axioms, but to get there, you’ll need to navigate the labyrinth of your mind. It requires both courage and vulnerability to dissect one's thoughts, beliefs, and experiences to uncover the core principles that guide our actions.
By understanding our own principles, we can use them to shape our environments and harmonize them with our true selves.
I’ve performed the exercise myself several times and recently took another stab at it.
Introspection
2022 was my year of introspection, and this newsletter was born out of that work. In my first issue, I outlined several of the ideas from a previous iteration of my Memex and spent a few issues going into detail. Now, I’d like to do the same again.
Before I jump into my findings, I thought I’d share a little bit about my process.
How to Make Your Memex
First of all, plan to make a bad one. You’re not going to get it right on the first try. It’s really much more about structured brainstorming than it is refinement. Start with a blank canvas and start writing down any ideas that resonate with you. Visa and I both used Scapple, but feel free to use any tool you like. I recommend starting by copying your favorite ideas from mine, Visa’s, or anyone else’s you’ve come across. Here’s another for your inspiration.
You’re looking for any idea that resonates with you. Start with singular ideas, you don’t need to link them just yet. Each bubble doesn’t need to be the most pithy encapsulation of your personality and core values just yet.
Think about your influences. What do they write or speak about? What have you absorbed? If you’re a creator yourself, what have you produced that felt the most personal? What’s the thing inside you that you feel the most compelled to write about or can’t stop reading about? Write it down. Don’t worry if the wording isn’t right.
Once you’ve gotten a decent chunk of ideas on the page, it’s time to start thinking about how they’re related. Don’t start with arrows, just think about which ideas are linked. See which ideas are hubs and which remain peripheral. The more linked an idea, the more important it likely is to you.
At this point, you need to start refining. Think if there’s a better way to phrase an idea and check that it resonates. You should feel something when you read each bubble. A little fist pumping energy inside you that screams “YES! This is important!” If you don’t, it might be worth removing the bubble.
If you want, you can start to introduce a little bit of hierarchy here. You can use some kind of bold or shading to indicate which ideas are the most important. You might find that two points are really the same thing or that one just follows from another. That’s good! That means that you’re finding the patterns in your life.
Once you don’t feel like you can make any obvious improvements, it’s time to step away. Let it sit for a few months. Let the winds carry you on new explorations and come back to it slightly changed. Create a new doc with a blank canvas and start the process again. Over time, your memex will come closer to representing you as you really are.
My Memex
Alright, now it’s time to take a look at me. I’m going to list my bolded points sorted by the number of connections each has.
Think in systems (9)
Looking closely is everything (6)
Inhabit conflicting thoughts (6)
Understand how you were made (5)
Outsource your brain to your environment (5)
Live Consciously (4)
Cultivate your taste (4)
Clear your inboxes (4)
People think in stories, not numbers (3)
No failures of imagination (3)
Reach down, don’t pull the ladder up behind you (3)
Live! In the Miyazaki sense (2)
My first thought is that this relative importance seems about right to me. As this is my third iteration, I’m feeling pretty confident in the repeated themes, but I’m still coming up with new ones and better understanding how they’re all related.
Writing as Brain Augmentation
There are numerous motives for engaging in writing, but two key aspects resonate with me. Firstly, writing amplifies my cognitive capabilities exponentially. Memory is delicate, and there's a limit to what I can demand from my brain and body. Instead of struggling to remember everything, I can delegate less critical tasks to my environment and focus my finite resources on tackling the most important work.
This is the beauty of the Getting Things Done system. By writing down everything you need to do, you eliminate the need to remember your to-do lists. Since adopting GTD, I've experienced significant improvements in personal productivity and reduced stress levels. This approach to task management exemplifies how writing can help us organize our lives more effectively. I’ve written a bit about this before in Inbox Productivity.
My second reason for writing is that it’s improved my ability to speak about complex ideas. Essentially, I’ve precomputed lots of hard thoughts. When I’m talking about something I’ve written about, I already know how to walk through the topic and have high quality examples and anecdotes to drop at the appropriate times. As Neil deGrasse Tyson emphasizes, his polished public speaking prowess is a direct result of writing first. Reflecting on my experience hosting the Subnet Show, I can attest that writing has made a profound impact on my communication skills as well.
Taste, Stories, Looking Closely, and Conscious Experience
Of all the topics I’m presenting here, I’ve spent the most words writing about these themes. Life on Autopilot, my first issue, Abstraction Thinking, and a number of unpublished drafts. To put it succinctly, I think the underlying key to living well is to actually take control of your environment instead of letting life sweep you along. Actively decide where you want to go instead of taking the default path.
Doing so is really hard, but so is anything worth doing. It requires that you make an effort to understand the world as it really is and not how it appears to be. You need to look past the symbols and summaries and dig into the real details. Once you do, develop your taste. Try to find good explanations of the world and of yourself. What moves you? What stories speak to you?
If you can figure that out, you’re well positioned to create work that you want to see more of. And that is how you build the world you want.
Conflicting Thoughts
As much as the modern world likes certainty and 280 characters of conviction, the world is much more complicated then that. People love caricatures and symbols. Every main character on Twitter is “good” or “evil.” But the truth is that life, and the people within it, are rarely as one-dimensional as we would like them to be.
The world has no shortage of two-sided debates with participants forcing bystanders to pick a side. Insisting on a binary frame is too reductive. Both stories can be true, at least to some extent. It’s not always 50/50, but it’s a mistake to always side 100 to 0.
As much as I admire the idea of harmony of pen and sword, Yukio Mishima’s (and Paul Schrader’s) concept of unifying one’s actions with one’s beliefs, I think it’s an impractical idea for those not wishing to turn their lives into a work of art. Cognitive dissonance can be a feature not a bug. Not because we can use it to ignore inconsistencies, but because we can leverage it to not reject paradoxes out of hand. Our world stories may have much truth to them, but if we wish to create better explanations, we need to find their problems.
Systems Thinking
Nothing exists in isolation.
Whenever you try to solve a problem, it’s crucial to ask whether you’re treating a symptom or the root cause. Root causes are rarely obvious and frequently require deep thinking. Look for the incentives! Frequently, you need to admit that things are too complicated for you to understand. You don’t need to always be perfect, but trying matters.
The failure mode here is oversimplification. Embrace complication! Embrace conflicting feedback loops! Insisting that your simplistic frame is the ultimate truth in spite of overwhelming conflicting evidence is a path to real harm.
Your life and behavior are also systems! Instead of saying you’ll accomplish something by “trying harder,” actually look at your systems and how they feed into your behavior. Frequently, adjusting the system is the easiest path to self improvement.
I used to drive myself crazy by always leaving my dirty clothes on the floor instead of putting them in a laundry hamper. I fixed this habit overnight by moving my laundry bin from far away to where I actually got dressed. That was much easier than forcibly retraining my dressing habits.
Seek to Understand the Self
If you want to improve yourself, you need to understand yourself. Everyone reaches adulthood with some sort of trauma, some more severe than others. If you don’t spend time unpacking it, it will always exert some control over you, and you’ll likely pass it on to your kids.
Whenever your environment inflicts a new behavior upon you, it writes a new “law of the universe” into your brain’s operating system. The most important thing you can do is discover that this law exists and figure out where it came from. Seeing it for what it truly is gives you the power to change it. Without this, it will continue to hold power over you. Whether you choose to eliminate the rule or not is up to you. Not all rules are bad! But the key piece is making sure you’re choosing to allow this rule into your life. Choose who you want to be.
Where My Memex Falls Short
Having done this exercise three times, I’m starting to see many recurring patterns. Important ideas are becoming more deeply crystalized, but I’ve also uncovered many new ideas. I’d still like to understand the relationship between each idea better. I can see many relationships, but right now none are directional. Which ideas immediately lead to others? Where should someone who wants adopt some of these principles start?
I don’t want to ever create a “final” version of my memex. That would mean I’ve stopped growing as a person. I’d like to stave off the entropic heat death of my personality as long as possible.
Thanks for making it this far. I’d highly encourage you to try making your own memex. It doesn’t need a deep purpose and can just be for fun. I’ve certainly found it useful.
I’ll be back with more on company building and personal introspection in a few weeks. Till then!