This is where you generate all the insights. This is where ideas collide. It’s where your ideas battle for relational positioning. This is the most joyous and valuable stage.
Once you have all your ideas in one MOC, use it like a crucible where ideas can battle it out for positioning, forcing you to grind them to their fundamental essence—thinking of their proximal importance to each other and building stronger connective tissue between them.
Great work is accomplished during in this conceptual battle royale. The product of this work is rarely one without satisfaction.
Day 1
Naturally, excitedly, organically—without a task manager telling me what to do—I open up a note—2015-02-20 Habit Concepts and Theory—and I craft it into an evergreen note. But I when I try to name it, I realize it’s too big, so I split it up into two evergreen notes:
The neural formation of habits is additive - v1 The truest habit metaphors are additive - v1
And I have even more stuff remaining in that note but I haven’t figured out what to call it yet.
I leave the others alone for now.
2013-03-10 Habit Planning 2015-02-20 Habit Formation Research Article
Atomic Habits (book) 2019-01-25 Resiliency Routines
I’m done for the night. I’m comforted by this MOC; my notes have a digital workbench to rest upon. I’m satisfied with creating two evergreen notes. They have value to me. I go to sleep smiling.
Day 2
I continued where I left off. This was the big session where the magic happened.
Now look at your collected notes and the questions will just arrive, unforced: What are they trying to say? What is redundant? What note needs to be split into two? What outside concepts relate to this?
You naturally work yourself into a state of Flow and time becomes timeless; effort effortless. Here were my results:
- The neural formation of habits is additive - This note shrank. It went into other notes, most notably a new evergreen note on the evolutionary function of habits.
- The truest habit metaphors are additive - I already had this note
- An asymptotic curve models the development of skills, strength, habits, and more - I wanted to single out the importance of a graph curve in describing habits and a bunch of other stuff
- The mechanism for breaking through development plateaus - The other half of the coin is figuring out how to “game” this curve to avoid plateaus to our developments
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Understanding the habit cycle and habitual cues - this started as notes from The Power of Habit, but I reduced its scope when I gave it a clear title.
- Charting out habit cycles in my life circa 2013 - here’s a practical way to chart out habits
- How Atomic Habits fit into the conversation on habits - I had notes from a book on habits, but tried to re-fashion it more tightly into the rest of this corpus on habits
- Resiliency Routines help regain a sense of control - this is partially a journal but it’s valuable to the conversation on habits
- Words I’ve used to describe important habits - this is more like a journal; it’s of limited value to others
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Habit formation provides an evolutionary advantage - This was talked about in several notes, but it needed to be a foundational point.
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Habits carry a ton of hidden inertia - While writing about how neural formations strengthen, I tried to figure out how to best express the hidden momentum of habits. It needed its own note.
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Defining a habit - I realized I needed a note define the actual thing I’ve been talking about
I also try to keep track of the standalone concepts I’ve roped in here: Feedback Loop Cobwebs into Cables Newton’s Laws of Motion Natural Selection Survival of the Fittest Selfish Gene TK
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