James March
wants to talk about
So this is an interesting question because I think a true reset would involve just listening for a while and seeing what is out there. Actively not looking. That's how I found out about all the history blogs with their Blog Carnivals, and Small Wars Journal, and the like. And executedtoday.com. All of those were very goal-driven discoveries. I was making things and so I found news that fed into the making. So maybe a way to frame this (sorry to meta-ize your sensible question and propose new frames, I am annoying) could be: What are your goals, big and little? And how can you keep track of things that support them?
I love your meta-izing, Paul Ford. I have been trying to get my arms around "discovery through imagination" versus "discovery through action." Your process of goal-driven discoveries - (1) identify goal, and (2) focus on resources that support goal - is the way I have developed systems. I am a very imaginative fellow who sees everything as a "machine" (the goal) needing only the right "cogs" (the resources) and time to make it productive (continued on next post).
(continued from previous post) Another discovery path is fast overwhelming goal-driven discoveries. This path is more random, more chaotic, and similar to biological evolution. It is the path of highly connected interactive systems, where the problems are too complicated to be understood by any one person, and the solutions are discovered by millions of relatively chaotic attempts. This form of discovery looks more like an eco-system with its billions of interacting agents, each agent making nearly infinitely small contributions, the result of which sums neither to zero nor infinity, but some semi-stable balance point in between.
Thanks for your feedback! Team Branch
