Scott P Scheper, page 39
In other words, the magic of the Antinet doesn’t revolve around links. Rather it involves being very selective in what you link cards to. Whenever you install a card in the Antinet, you link by (1) chaining or connecting the card behind another card, and (2) using remotelinks. Due to the analog nature of the Antinet, you are forced to be very selective about what you link to, and to think hard about where a card ought to go, before installing it. With digital notetaking apps, it’s simple. You simply start typing in words for tags or wikilinks. The tool then begins auto-populating terms you can link to. Before you know it, you have numerous things you’re linking to which you otherwise wouldn’t have. With the Antinet, you’re usually choosing one, or maybe two cards to link to. This creates selective relations instead of an overabundance of hyper relations. This element serves as a critical factor in transitioning your Antinet into a second mind, as well as allowing for structured accidents, which I’ll detail later in the book.
A Link is Not a Link (If It’s a Hyperlink)
A notecard link is hard. It’s hard-earned. It’s deliberate. It’s selective. It’s a hard link. This is part of what inspired the term I use for linking cards. They’re cardlinks (because it rhymes with hard links).
Cardlinks are not the equivalent of hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are not selective. The Antinet is based around being selective. Antinet users are selective about (1) the books they read, (2) the material they extract from those books, and (3) the selective links they create within the Antinet.
Cardlinks are of superior impact compared to wikilinks and hyperlinks. Digital links are whittled down by synthetic features like auto-complete, regex, or retroactive search. Cardlinks are superior to digital links not only because they are not diluted by bloatware. In addition, the power of cardlinks are unleashed when you begin taking advantage of the tree structure of the Antinet. When you follow a cardlink in the Antinet, you’re taken down a journey of stems, leaves and other branches of thought that are also linked together.
This results in structured accidents and surprises (like walking down the row of a section in the library that interests you). This accidental discovery happens in a way that is almost incommunicable. Why? Because you follow the path that is made possible thanks to the Antinet’s tree structure.
This is a glimpse into the magic of the Antinet as a thinking tool and a second mind. The magic does not stem from just one thing alone, and it doesn’t come about through creating trivial easy links (aka, wikilinks). It’s a combination of the four principles of the Antinet that creates its magic:
The “special filing technique,” refers to the tree structure which unlocks infinite internal branching. The “(selective) relations” between notes (made possible through numeric-alpha addresses).640 These, combined with the index which neuroimprints keyterms on the mind. These are tied together with the analog component of the Antinet, which forces higher quality selections. All of these combined creates the emergent magic of the Antinet.
As Johannes Schmidt points out, this structure demonstrates how quickly the Antinet sets users on a path away from what one would normally deem ordered and taxonomically sound. Although the Antinet’s inner logic might appear nonsensical to an outsider, to the creator—that is, to you, the person creating the system—the Antinet is perfectly natural and understandable.641
Through exploration of your Antinet, you are led away from the original topic and to a variety of other subjects—ones that you would not have initially associated with one another. This, in turn, results in unconventional interactions, surprises, and breakthrough insights that otherwise would not have occurred.
This entire process is made possible thanks to linking not being too easy. It’s thanks to the nature of hard links. It’s thanks to the nature of cardlinks.
Digital Creates Overselection
As I’ve previously illustrated, it’s not just about what material to select. It’s also about what material not to select.
For this reason, tools that help you not select as much information (due to the considerable time and effort required in extracting them), end up increasing your focus. It increases one’s proficiency in selecting valuable and irresistible material.
With digital tools, selection is trivial. It’s all-too-easy to capture, copy, paste, write, and accumulate an abundance of digital information. This is a downside, not a strength. This is yet another reason why analog outperforms digital. Digital collection results in over-saturation, both in terms of material and the information the material includes.
Material Selection
Thus far we’ve talked about source selection (i.e., what books to select for reading). We also discussed link selection (where in your Antinet to install ideas). The last level of selection concerns what material within a book one should select.
The Four Quadrants of Ideas
I think it’s helpful to think of ideas falling into four quadrants. This concept is inspired by a model introduced to me by Stephen Covey.
Covey proposes four quadrants for managing time by looking at the intersection of four variables: important, not important, urgent, and not urgent.642
With regards to selecting material from the books you read, I propose this model helps tremendously. One is left with selecting Bad Ideas, Good Ideas, Excellent Ideas, and Irresistible Ideas.
Here’s a diagram of the model:
Let’s go through each of these now.
Bad Ideas
Don’t select bad ideas or pay attention to them. It’s pretty simple. If the idea is irrelevant to what you’re working on and if the idea isn’t even that important, then don’t think twice about it. Even if you’re unsure, err on the side of the idea being a waste of time. We need to move fast. Time is short. Have the confidence that truly valuable ideas will take hold of you later on.
Good Ideas
These are ideas that could very well be timely and applicable to what you’re working on, yet they don’t add much value. If the idea doesn’t add much value to your project, or if the information is redundant, then forego selecting them for your project.
For instance, I could bog myself down for a year reading scholarly literature on the history of notetaking systems. I could fill your mind with mountains of seemingly relevant details pertaining to early notebox systems. I could tell you about how there’s a debate as to whether the Josephinian catalog of the late 1700s was the first card catalog in library history or if Konrad Gessner’s of the 1500s actually was.643
But in reality, that information isn’t that important. The matter at hand is this: (1) you want to know why the Antinet is the best knowledge development system out there; (2) you want to know the theory behind why it’s better than digital; (3) you want to know how you can build an Antinet; and (4) you want to know what positive effects you can expect by committing to the Antinet (surprise, creative insights, breakthroughs, etc.). You do not need to know every single detail about the history of notetaking. That’s for a different book.
In brief, don’t feel the need to select material that is related to what you’re doing, but is not that important. Avoid selecting good ideas. It’s OK to note them in your mind and find them interesting and amusing, but that’s all they deserve. A grunt of amusement.
Excellent Ideas
Deciding whether to select or ignore excellent ideas is tricky. These ideas are important, yet they are not relevant to the project or goal you’re working on.
I realize it may be difficult, but you want to err on the side of skipping these ideas. Granted, there’s a spectrum to the degree of importance. If the idea ranks at least 96 out of 100 on the importance spectrum, it’s OK to select the idea.644 However, you should only extract the idea onto your bibcard (which you’ll learn more about soon). You do not want to spend time processing these ideas by converting them into maincards (by way of excerpt, reformulation, or reflection notes). You’ll want to create an ExRef for excellent ideas, but that’s all.
Irresistible Ideas
You want to spend almost all of your time living for the irresistible ideas. These are ideas that are both timely and important. Think of these as ideas that truly resonate with you. When you encounter one of these ideas, you simply just know. These ideas can be something that you (and only you) can see. These ideas are influenced by your own perspectives and unique experiences in life (both good and bad). These ideas collide with truths you’ve been contemplating that are reverberating in your mind. These are usually things that only you can see and connect.
Time is scarce. This is why you shouldn’t care to bother with any of the other quadrants. You want to reserve as much time as possible to select and develop irresistible ideas.
Do not feel obligated to write down excellent ideas. A good chunk of them will be relegated to good ideas in a month. The ideas you want to write down are the irresistible ideas.
Make Ideas Prove Themselves
Oftentimes, I’ll make an idea prove itself. I’ll make it prove that it’s irresistible. For instance, I’ll read something I feel is irresistible on page 100. But I won’t decide immediately whether to select it. I won’t extract it immediately onto a bibcard. I’ll simply say to myself, Hmm! That’s really interesting! I note it in my mind and let it ruminate for some time. And then I continue reading. By the time I get to page 150—even if it’s several days later—if I still find the idea irresistible, I’ll extract it by writing it down on my bibcard.
What Should and Shouldn’t You Select?
One author, who, to a large degree, regurgitates Sönke Ahrens’s material, puts forth a good question that Ahrens never answers clearly. The question is, What should, and shouldn’t, be noted down?
Ahrens is rather vague in answering this question, but he at least advises the reader what not to do. This other author advises: don’t write down anything you already know by heart. Yet, he qualifies this maxim by saying it’s OK to write down something you already know—if, that is—you intend to connect it to related thoughts.645 Such advice is problematic, however, because everything is related to something in the cosmos. Even nothing can be related by describing it. How does one describe nothing? By stating it’s not nothing, and linking it to not nothing in your Antinet. Everything can be connected to related thoughts by way of inversion.
In brief the advice that you shouldn’t write down anything you know by heart—unless you wish to relate it to something else—is rather vague. I also believe it’s too simplistic.
The question remains, What types of things should you write down?
A better way of asking this is, What types of material should you select while reading? Here’s why this is an improved question: the material you select doesn’t necessitate that you’ll extract that knowledge. You’re selecting material to determine if it’s appropriate to actually extract.
So back to the question, What types of material should you select while reading?
Here’s my take:
1. Adhere to the rule of selecting only irresistible things from your readings. Irresistible things are those things that only you can determine. Irresistible encompasses those things you find to be genius, or that you find you simply just resonate with in a way that’s difficult to explain in words. It must be true. Only you can determine if something is truly irresistible.
2. Select irresistible patterns that you’ve noticed from reading across different disciplines. Also select patterns you’ve noticed from your unique life experiences.
3. Select irresistible ideas that are brand new to you. Granted, if you’re reading in a new field, many of the ideas you encounter will be brand new. That’s fine. Write them down, especially if they resonate with you.
4. Select hard or challenging ideas that you find irresistible. Say you encounter an idea that you find irresistible. Say it resonates with you. Yet, say you find it hard or challenging to decipher. Select that material with the expectation that you’ll be creating an excerpt note of it, or a reformulation note of it in order to better understand it.
5. Select as if you’ll be teaching the material. Even if you’re in a state of mind where you’re focused on growing your knowledge, adopt the mindset of a teacher. Operate as if you’re selecting the material in order to teach the material. This is the contribution state of mind. The great paradox is that if you adopt the mindset of contribution, you’ll experience more growth. When you select material as if you’ll be teaching it, you’ll focus on extracting the truly helpful and insightful pieces of knowledge.
6. Select material that deeply affects you. There may be certain passages or compositions of prose that move you. Remember that emotions can actually be felt in the body (so pay attention to your responses to the material you read). Fundamentally, emotions can be rolled up into five categories.646 The five emotions are: anger, sadness, fear, joy, and creative feelings. Material which generates deep experiences involving these emotions ought to be selected.
Now that you know what to select, let’s address the material you should definitely not select while reading.
This question is simpler. There are two types of material you should not select:
1. Do not select information that is not irresistible. Do not select material that is bad, good, or even excellent. If it’s not irresistible, don’t waste your time. You’ll have barely enough time to elaborate on and develop irresistible material. Why waste your life energy trying to develop less than irresistible material? The correct answer is: you shouldn’t!
2. Do not write something down that you’ve already written down. In the knowledge creation phase I’ll introduce a process that helps ensure you don’t waste your time developing content you’ve already written down by hand. In brief, it involves reviewing your Antinet before you commit to creating a new note. The directive of not writing down something you’ve already written down applies mainly to excerpt notes. Say you come across Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Road Not Taken (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”). If you find that poem irresistible, yet you’ve already written it down, then don’t write it down again! Don’t select the material again. If you make a mistake and forget that you’ve already written it down—and if you end up creating an excerpt note for it—make sure you install the note in your Antinet anyway. That way, you’ll have a record of your mistake. Remember: don’t erase mistakes! Don’t delete material in your Antinet.
Now that we have a good grasp of what material to select while reading a book, let’s talk about one final concept before moving on: the concept of priming.
Priming
The process you must complete before reading even the first page of any book is called the priming phase.647
The priming phase entails reading related material, relevant background material, even dissecting the book’s table of contents, and other techniques (for instance, designing a quiz about the book for yourself).
According to one cognitive psychologist, priming “really does help, especially when the subject matter is difficult or unfamiliar.”648
I have a specific process that I encourage you to do before reading any book. It works best with a certain knowledge extraction strategy called the Luhmannian bibcard method. I’ll detail that method in the next section. For this, however, all you’ll need is a 4 x 6 inch blank white notecard.
On the front-side of the bibcard you will write three items: (1) the bibliographic details of the source, (2) your goal in engaging the source, and (3) an overview of the source if available (i.e., a brief overview of its table of contents).
This becomes your bookmark as you read the book.
Here’s a picture of one of my bibcards. The front can be thought of as the priming area:
Creating an Overview
Note that the overview section isn’t a word-for-word copy of the table of contents. It’s brief. It forces you to take the deliberate time to read the table of contents and get a general idea of what you’re about to read.
This practice was inspired by Mortimer Adler’s classic book titled How to Read a Book. In this book he introduces the practice he calls X-raying a book. He uses this analogy to illustrate that one ought to get a sense of a book’s skeleton—its structure—before reading it.
This practice is also supported by a cognitive scientist who specializes in notetaking. She advises that one ought to analyze a book’s table of contents as an important first step before reading any book.649
Setting a Goal
Being intentional with your reading is a game-changer, plain and simple. Luhmann always had an intentional goal with his readings. He used short-term projects (research papers) that enabled him to immediately apply many of his ideas, and if those ideas weren’t immediately useful, to place ExRefs in their appropriate place to ruminate on and be used when the time came.
Luhmann published 550 research papers during his academic career. Two hundred more papers were found among his belongings after he passed away. This comes out to 750 papers. Let’s not even take into consideration the seventy books he also published during this period. If we just look at the papers, he was working on roughly two papers per month. Luhmann, ultimately, was always reading with a specific project in mind.
As Antonin Sertillanges advises, your reading should be influenced by a definite idea—a clear goal and purpose. “Let it take account not only of your vocation and your personality, but of their immediate application.”650
In other words, read specifically with an eye for immediately applying the knowledge you encounter.
For the knowledge you encounter that is irresistible yet not immediately applicable, simply create an ExRef for the material in your Antinet. In brief, your time creating main notes—specifically reflection notes—should be for material that is immediately applicable.
