Reviewing Old Notes
"A link between a problem and a solution depends heavily on the simultaneity of their 'arrivals.'” - Jim March in his classic HBR Interview, "Ideas as Art"
Unless you're often pondering the challenge of putting new things into the world, this obscure quote might be a bit of a head scratcher. 'Simultaneity of arrivals'?? I know.
Layman's translation: solutions become compelling when the problems they address are in one's field of awareness. This may sound obvious, but when we appreciate the demands on our time and attention, we can start to see the challenge: it's not a given that a solution "arrives" at the same time that a problem enters our consciousness. But that simultaneity of arrival is crucial to spark action.
This is where daily practice can be particularly helpful.
A healthy daily idea practice is comprised of two central ingredients: documentation and review. If you don't capture an idea (documentation), it's as if it never occurred. But if you never look over your old notes (review), you'll probably harvest a fraction of the total available potential, because problems aren't equally-pressing at any given moment, regardless of their objective importance. (Ever denied yourself the pleasure of a sneeze while holding a sleeping baby?)
As is often the case in life, timing is everything, and the beauty of a regular practice of review is that we enable ourselves to effectively time-shift on ideas: they may be the same ideas, but I'm a (hopefully!) new and improved me, interacting with those ideas. So those old ideas can be effectively new to me, as I've become aware of new problems, or have gained experience through daily life, experiments, and other knowledge-creating activities.
Just like Seinfeld spends half his morning generating new material, and the other half reviewing old stuff, it's useful to not only go through the new ideas of the day, but also sift through the old stuff too. I've been amazed to discover "timeless" ideas buried in old notebooks. The reality is, they weren't good ideas when I wrote them because the time wasn't right; but I was able to capitalize on them when their time had come, because I pushed myself into stumbling over them by making space not just for documentation, but also for review.
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