Show Your Work - 1

So I decided to pick a bit of an indulgent book to read next and add to the system. I got the book on a whim from an amazon sale, in a moment of weakness. Show Your Work by Austin Kleon is definately a sucker purchase, but there's a small chance I'm going to read something useful.

So far, I'm through the second chapter, it's doing a lot of affirming exactly what I wanted to hear, and without doing a lot of critical thinking so far. While I'm eating it up, it does have some advice that aligns with some of the stuff Luhmann suggested. What struck me was a passage that suggested sharing the process might be valuable. In what I've read 2nd hand about Luhmann, that he would commit the days work to his system every day.

There's something to be said about reconsidering my definition of work in this exercise. It's probably normal to consider reading a book for learning in itself to be sufficient. Some people may take it beyond that and go through and highlight important passages. Luhmann went further and took condensed notes as he read, and then went further to integrate what he learned into his main system.

I've been considering this effort recently, but I'm still not fully to the point of building my notes (zettelkasten, 2nd brain, whatever). It can be described as procrastination, but I'm finding it overwhemling to add notes to a system that isn't aware of what I already have floating around in my brain. I need to get out of my own head and start building. There is a certainty that I will make errors in this, but to the credit of Show Your Work, I need to start thinking ahead. This site really isn't the product - the process is the product.

So instead of reading the book non-stop then converting my notes digitally and then not having enough motivation to convert those reference notes into my system, I need to stop short reading and make sure I complete the process daily. Like Toyota, I need to embrace the work that's hard (when they kept stamping in house and make swapping dies a strategic advantage). Doing the first cycle may suck, but the 10th will be easier than the first and so forth. At some point in the future, maybe I'll have something more valuable as a product, but more importantly I'll have a process that is much more effective.

I'm not sure I'm going to accomplish this every day, but as described by Matt D'Avella, I should implement the 2 Day Rule. And my definition of done should be that I read part of the book and take summary notes, I add those notes to my sources (I'm intentionally hand writing the notes per the Smart Notes recommendation I agree with), I want to document my process here in a post, and I want to take some time to consider what I've read and build out my notes more.

I just took a stab at writing my first note. It's not good. I mean, it has the basic components of an argument, but it's poorly supported, doesn't feel great and overall it doesn't spark joy or anything. But it does cover one of the long running thoughts I've been chasing around, so from that perspective it's a for real start.

I will say the thought that keeps rolling around in my mind is that for this effort to really have teeth, I need to pitch a different theory that I don't necesarily agree with, and build out the same structure. I may need to build out several alternate arguments on the topic as well as adjacent arguments on related concepts that when considered concurrently lead to my conclusions.

I can see with some persistent time this will turn into something cool, but it still feels really daunting.