Hello readers!
I didn’t have time to write a short email, so I wrote a long one.
I took some time off this week for my son’s school trip because I love excursions with my son and never miss them (except when my yima passed away). I’m also tweaking the format of this newsletter because I want it to feel more like a personal email than a commercial templated newsletter. Thoughts welcome!
As an experiment, here are five short notes for this week:
As part of a slower and more intentional life, I write these weekly emails and make Fernsage, an organized notebook for lifetime wisdom.
Write Club
Yesterday, I was chatting with a friend about notetaking and compounding knowledge. He mentioned how if writing is thinking and most people aren’t writing, then most people aren’t thinking!
its just like
there are running clubs.
there are reading clubs.
there are chess clubs. there are xyz clubs.
heck, even have ice bath club.
but...
no club to get people to sit down and think.
Well, there should be one.
If I were to start one, here are the rules:
For two hours every Friday morning, sit down to write
Turn off the Wi-Fi on your computer
Turn on Do Not Disturb on your phone and leave it out of sight
The only requirement is to publish what you have written at the end (If you have a website, great. Otherwise, a Google Doc is fine, too.)
Bonus: Read one another’s published notes
(Sorry, there will be no talks, no networking, and no food!)
You don’t actually need a club to do this. It is what I have been practicing by myself at home, and it has been surprisingly helpful.
If you haven’t been writing regularly, this will be hard. You will stare at the blinking cursor for 10-15 minutes with nothing coming to mind. So, here are my recommendations:
Write about something small, and see where it leads you. Don’t aim to write a novel or a thesis.
Write about something you did or something that happened to you recently. (I once wrote about replacing my Aeron chair with a $10 wooden stool, which made me realize I had fallen for the sunk cost fallacy.)
Or write about a decision you want to make. (Writing about wanting to focus led me to set up a more thorough writing environment.)
Or write about something bothering you. (After I wrote about why notetaking hasn’t helped me feel more knowledgeable, I went to read up on tacit knowledge.)
For the first hour, don’t edit. Just let your words flow. Edit in the second hour.
If you commit to this, after a few attempts, your brain will start noticing things you might want to write about each Friday.
What if you need to research and verify information online? No, you don’t have to during that two-hour window. You can do that afterwards. In fact, if you sit with the uncertainty as you write and commit to it even just for two hours, you will remember the information better when you research online later, especially if you turn out to be wrong. You can always update your published note.
If you want to try this and want someone to hold you accountable, send me your published note at hello@alfredlua.com. I’ll read it and reply to you.
Why notetaking hasn’t helped me feel wiser
Through my schooling years, I developed a notetaking system that helped me score great results. But that system didn’t help in life.
The system was simple. A few weeks before the exams, I’d print out all the lecture slides and rewrite everything in my own words as much as possible in a notebook. One notebook for each module. In the days leading up to the exams, I’d read only the notebooks and not the lecturer’s slides. During the exams, when I needed to recall certain information, I could even pull up a mental image of that information in the notebook, saym in the bottom-right of a page.
There were two issues with this system: First, I could remember the information well for only a few weeks. After the exams, when I didn’t need the information anymore because my first job didn’t require my degree, I slowly forgot what I had learned. The second issue, though, is the bigger problem:
In life, there are no neatly-defined modules, no lecture slides to print out, and no scheduled dates for “tests”.
My fabulous notetaking system became useless.
For the past 10 years, I have tried various methods and modifications. But I have yet to find a suitable system. More importantly, I don’t feel particularly more knowledgeable. I believe there are several causes why notetaking hasn’t helped. (My counter-arguments are in italic.)
The fields I have been in have moved fast, so notes became outdated quickly. When I was doing marketing at Buffer, content marketing (as in writing articles) was just becoming a thing. Then there was tweeting, and then Facebook and Instagram Live, and then TikTok. Then, when I moved into AI, well, things moved even faster. But I suspect (1) there has to be a good way to update notes and/or our knowledge just as quickly and (2) even as the field moves fast, there are timeless concepts and skills; for example, writing is as necessary for articles and TikTok scripts.
I didn’t have a clear purpose for my notes. This could be because I have been “jumping around” professionally, dealing with areas ranging from marketing to designing to bookkeeping, and not having one or a few clear goals. When I tried to do too many things and take notes for everything, taking notes became too overwhelming and time-consuming. This is also why I find the second-brain approach too much. I have many interests, and collecting everything I’m remotely interested in so that I might use it in the future felt like too much work for an unknown upside. Perhaps the simple solution is to take notes for only a single goal that is most important to me (e.g. learn X) and leave everything else to memory.
Much of the “knowledge” I deal with is hard to write down. It could be “taste”, “intuition”, or “tacit knowledge”. I can write down the formula to calculate the price of a bond but there is no one-line formula for building a product people want. “Talk to users” is great advice but insufficient on its own. Cedric Chin of Commoncog has written several articles on tacit knowledge and is running a great experiment of teaching people business expertise through repeated reading and analyses of many case studies (I’m over-simplifying his approach here!) So, such “knowledge” can be extracted and written down.
There are no regular or well-defined “tests”. I define “tests” very broadly as situations that demand our knowledge and help us refine and retain our knowledge. Writing notes alone doesn’t help us grow smarter if we don’t apply the knowledge or “test” ourselves. Spaced repetition is useful for remembering facts, like when I’m learning Japanese. But we can’t Anki our way to writing good essays or making products people want or playing the piano. Chip War described how smart folks like Morris Chang optimized their chip production yields but that has a well-defined, easily-measurable goal. In a way, we could define each essay or even product as a test. But how do we measure it, especially when you are starting out with zero readers or users or when there is too much noise in the results? How about business decisions that happen infrequently? Can they be run like science experiments? I suspect this is more of an art than science, and it is up to individuals to define their subjective or objective measurements. For example, Michael Nielsen talked about creating artifacts, especially when he needed to teach what he had learned, to help him retain knowledge.
Maintaining and updating notes takes a lot of effort. Some effort is necessary because the friction helps us learn and retain information better. But if it requires too much work, we are serving the system and not the other way around. As with above, reducing the scope will help. Also, regular “tests” might be a good solution, which could reduce or even eliminate the need for notetaking. A small example: if you keep coding similar functions for various products, you can reach a point where you don’t have to note down how to code those functions.
I have been using notetaking apps mostly as scratchpads rather than an accumulation of knowledge. I take meeting notes in Notion, I write outlines in Obsidian, I put todos in Apple Notes. I suspect the ease of creating notes led me to use them as temporary documents—which I think might be fine as long as I also turn the important ones into something more enduring, like an essay or permanent document.
(Do any of these resonate with you? What have you been doing to aid your learning?)
I’m coming to realize that notetaking is helpful for learning but insufficient on its own. What will compound knowledge is having a clear project where I can repeatedly apply what I know so far and seek out what I don’t know yet.
The curse of the wonderful devices
After sending my kids to school this morning, I got engrossed reading the latest AI debate and forgot about buying groceries for dinner tonight. I walked right past the supermarket as I stared down on my phone. By the time I realized my mistake, I had to walk five minutes back to the supermarket.
And after buying the groceries, I got distracted by Gemini. I was asking it how to stir fry pork ribs after cooking them in a soup. This time, I left my son’s stroller parked outside the supermarket.
Modern devices are such a wonder because they allow us to do so many things. But modern devices are also such a curse because they allow us to do so many things.
I have been trying to write for two hours every morning before I do anything else on my laptop. But it is just so distracting to have other apps opened at the same time: Claude, Brave Browser, Basecamp, Antigravity, Todoist, Notion Calendar. It is like eating oatmeal in front of an intercontinental breakfast buffet. Whenever I’m stuck writing, my brain will invent the most ridiculous task once it sees one of the other apps. “You know what, I should add a todo to write for two hours today in Todoist.” The tasks are always small, so I don’t feel bad spending a minute or so completing it. But my concentration has already been defeated, and I need to pay another few minutes to get back to writing.
Craig Mod writes on a separate laptop—without internet connection! I don’t have the luxury of having another laptop... Hmm actually maybe I should get the new MacBook Neo? I remember it is quite affordable. It’s a business expense, right? It’ll help me concentrate and write better. Let me just quickly check... And there goes another half an hour.
Until I have an air-gap solution, I need an environment with better boundaries. For now, here is what I’m experimenting with:
Hard Shutdowns: At the end of the work day, I shut down my laptop, not just shut the lid. I made sure only Obsidian will open automatically on login. Opening any other app requires an additional step. Every time I turn on my laptop, I’m already in my writing setup. It is a digital version of laying out my running attire the night before a morning run.
Offline by Default: I set up a Shortcut to turn off my Wi-Fi and shut down my laptop. When I start a new day, my laptop doesn’t have internet connection by default, so I don’t get distracted by “a little” browsing until I’m done writing for at least two hours.
It might seem absurd that I resort to such friction to focus. But I know I can’t trust my willpower alone. Creating the right environment beats relying on my willpower.
The stories we tell ourselves
For the past week, I had been wrestling with a problem:
When thinking about my next steps during my five-month break, I naturally gravitated to writing online, building Fernsage, and parenting. But they felt like three different paths. Some people might even consider them as three different jobs. Deep down, my gut told me they are, in fact, one thing. But on the surface, they sure didn’t look that way.
Gradually, I started to feel lost and doubtful.
I spent multiple days debating with Gemini and Claude and getting them to debate with each other. (Claude seemed much more critical when I asked it to comment on another LLM’s ideas and I explicitly said it’s from another LLM.) Then, I uncovered it:
I want to slow down to build things that last: my body and mind, my family, my writing, my software, my business.
I stepped away from the startup hustle to be more present with my family.
I quit social media and shifted to writing longer pieces on my own site. I swapped followers for subscribers.
I went from building AI tools based on the latest AI hype to making non-AI tools based on timeless practices1. I refuse to use fast, attention-hijacking TikTok videos to grow my business.
Writing online, building Fernsage, and parenting are, indeed, one thing: slowing down to build things that last.
Piecing together this story has helped me clarify why I’m doing three seemingly different jobs and gave me more confidence that this will work.
During my debate with Gemini and Claude, Claude criticized this story for being a nice tagline and warned me not to be fooled by it. “It is not load-bearing.” Perhaps that’s where machines and humans differ. The ever-objective machines are logical and rational but we soft-tissue humans are emotional and irrational. We don’t need facts as much as stories to tell ourselves.
Aeron and sunk cost
About 10 years ago, when I had a nice-paying job, I was tempted to buy a Herman Miller Aeron because everyone seemed to swear by one. I was working from home, and it felt justified to spend on an expensive, high-quality, branded chair. But when I tried it out at a local shop, I didn’t like it. So, I sat on a $10 wooden stool for many years.
People who discovered I was sitting on a wooden stool kept persuading me to get a “proper” chair. Two years ago, I caved and bought a second-hand Aeron for about $700. I wasn’t blown away when I got it, which should have been a sign. But I begrudgingly sat on it, even though I found it rather uncomfortable. I paid $700 for it! Everyone says it’s amazing! Maybe I just haven’t configured it well!
Today, I finally pushed away the Aeron chair and dragged over my $10 wooden stool. I already feel much better on my trusty wooden stool. I no longer fidget every few minutes to find a comfortable position.
You know what, I should have listened to myself.
What do you think of this format? I read and respond to every reply!
Warmly,
Alfred
This isn’t to say AI tools are bad or Fernsage will never have AI features. Features added only because of the latest hype, by definition, won’t be enduring. An example is the time when many apps added an AI chatbot just because ChatGPT became popular.