Commonplace
There are some days I just can't just any reading done.
Usually, these are the days when I've committed myself to reading something that I'm about a third of the way through, but I just can't concentrate and bring myself to pick up the damn book long enough to get anywhere. Or I end up staring through the same page for about 15 minutes.
I used to feel bad about this, and force myself, as a matter of discipline, to finish one book before I started reading another. I no longer feel bad about that...if a book doesn't stick to my brain, after so long, I let it go.
I read recently that some of the more modern philosophers and scholars, like John Locke and Francis Bacon, used to read several books all at once. Not simultaneously, mind you, but they jumped around from book to book. And to them, writing was indistinguishable from reading. As they plowed through each book, they would jot down notes in a journal, as a means of tracking and documenting their own ideas.
It was a practice known as commonplacing. The biggest benefit that comes out of this kind of jumbled approach to knowledge intake is that it's a means of chasing serendipity. Innovative ideas, in my experience, are born not of experts focusing hard in one area, but in random collisions that happen across different disciplines.
Commonplacing makes a good deal of sense to me, largely because this blog is me documenting my own internal responses to ideas or thoughts that I pull from blogs or books. Chances are good that on the average day, you're taking in a lot of input, and you probably have your own thoughts about what you read.
Why not start sharing it?
Usually, these are the days when I've committed myself to reading something that I'm about a third of the way through, but I just can't concentrate and bring myself to pick up the damn book long enough to get anywhere. Or I end up staring through the same page for about 15 minutes.
I used to feel bad about this, and force myself, as a matter of discipline, to finish one book before I started reading another. I no longer feel bad about that...if a book doesn't stick to my brain, after so long, I let it go.
I read recently that some of the more modern philosophers and scholars, like John Locke and Francis Bacon, used to read several books all at once. Not simultaneously, mind you, but they jumped around from book to book. And to them, writing was indistinguishable from reading. As they plowed through each book, they would jot down notes in a journal, as a means of tracking and documenting their own ideas.
It was a practice known as commonplacing. The biggest benefit that comes out of this kind of jumbled approach to knowledge intake is that it's a means of chasing serendipity. Innovative ideas, in my experience, are born not of experts focusing hard in one area, but in random collisions that happen across different disciplines.
Commonplacing makes a good deal of sense to me, largely because this blog is me documenting my own internal responses to ideas or thoughts that I pull from blogs or books. Chances are good that on the average day, you're taking in a lot of input, and you probably have your own thoughts about what you read.
Why not start sharing it?