Mapping Out a Life Map

I’ve spoken in the past about trying to create a hybrid system of some kind that is more than just a personal knowledge management system focused on knowledge but something that goes beyond it that can capture and structure growth, development, and wisdom of the person as well. This is essential to creating a life map of the person’s growth and development.

My biggest obstacle in achieving this all (and even trying to create something organized that relays my structured thoughts in a cohesive integrated way) is my addiction to exploration. I’m a junkie and I know it!

I’ve been trying repeatedly to use ChatGPT to help me break out of this addictive behaviour but without much success. However this week, conversations with it have helped me to understand more clearly the reality of what I am experiencing right now, so as to help me craft a new sort of experience that will in turn help me to move forward.

Adventuring Within Myself

The easiest way to describe how I work now is imagining my conversations with ChatGPT as though I am adventuring within myself. I have a question which becomes a quest which I initiate with ChatGPT. As we converse with a dialogue, I continue my questions like a quest chain in a MMORPG. In effect, my quest provides answers which prompt new questions in turn.

And the questions may poke or prod fears within me, tied to my beliefs, which may hamper my journey. However, lately I haven’t hit any which is strange. Anyways, after the conversation with ChatGPT ends, it feels amazing because it feels like I’ve uncovered all of these amazing “treasured” gems of insight.

However, here’s the thing. I haven’t. Let me explain why

Dungeon Speed Runs

What I’ve effectively done is what’s called a dungeon speed run in MMORPGs. People often do them to try to “level up” their character as quickly as possible. Something that probably relates perfectly to the rushed feeling I have in trying to level up myself in turn. But in my case, it’s a rushed feeling of rushing but going no where fast.

The reason for this is that I’m rushing through the different questions as a question chain, reading the amazing insights, and then finishing the conversation like it’s been completely incredible which it has. But then that’s it. I’m not extracting those insights from the conversation and then doing something with them!

Like duh! How fricken obvious. So it would be like doing a speed run in an MMORPG but you leave all of the treasure and quest rewards behind because you’re just focused on finishing it as fast as possible. Or in my case, you’re so focused on finishing it fast so that you can get on to the next question as a quest because I’m addicted to the exploration itself.

So the obvious question here is, “How can I create a system that lets me extract these insights and make use of them?”

Extracting Treasured Insights

So the obvious conventional way of doing this is keeping a journal. But I’ve done that in the past on my website and it doesn’t yield results that I feel like I can build upon. That’s because while journalling is great for extracting a flow of thoughts (almost like my conversations with ChatGPT), they’re not structured thoughts. So by the following week, those previous flowing thoughts can be lost behind newer flowing thoughts.

Of course, the next thing I immediately thought of was creating an evergreen notes system, which I’ve thought about before. Yet I’ve had difficultly in implementing this because the transition from a flowing journal to structured interlinked notes is difficult for me to grasp and practice.

Yet in reflecting upon this this week, I realize that I was trying to choose one approach OR another, when perhaps I needed to integrate a flowing journal AND structured notes together.

Flow & Structure > Explore & Exploit

This arose because I was thinking about Obsidian and how it is optimized for an evergreen notes system but it also contains a journal component to it. Basically the idea is that you start by journalling out experiences in your day and then you extract notes from that flow that you can then structure and interlink in turn.

So I’m already doing the flowing journalling part amazing well but I need to focus on the extraction and creation of structured notes from it in turn. That’s the real work I need to focus on. Why? Because it means stopping my exploring mindset and switching to an exploiting mindset.

In effect, I need to exploit and reap the rewards of what I’ve explored because I’m currently not.

And until I do so, until I can pull these insights outside of me, I will never be able to use them to build something that I can stand upon.

Practicing Creating Structure to Stand Upon Outside My Flow

So that’s the next big playful experiment I want to make. I want to take a conversations with ChatGPT, create a journal “post” from it on my website, extract the insights from it, and then create structured note “pages” that I interlink together.

Again the emphasis here is to let my flow in turn create my structure, kind of like how a river or stream drops sediment that creates a sandbar over time that in turn lets you step out of the water and stand upon solid ground. Ground that you’ve created.

But doing so in such a way that the river forms a delta that spreads out your thoughts into a structured way, letting you organize all of your thoughts in different ways.

Letting Intuitions Flow But Not Be Lost

Oh, this is the key point I wanted to make, as to why you need both the flowing journal and structured notes, especially for someone with my personality type. It’s because if you’re someone like me who is highly intuitive, you will often feel the importance of something rather than see it initially.

So having a journal to record your flow of thoughts helps you capture the thought. But then say if a week or two later, upon reflecting upon those thoughts, you suddenly realize what it relates and connects to, you can now extract those insights and add them to your structured notes, showing how they relate to and build upon existing knowledge.

This is why the flow journal is essential because it keeps your thoughts in a linear timeline at the very least. But the real power is when you extract those thoughts and begin to structure them together into a non-linear, bigger picture of interlinked thoughts, as though it was a map of your consciousness, broadening as you explore beyond its borders.

In effect, the idea here is to create something that is both structured but also exploratory in nature for others to explore themselves. And that’s what made me realize why I needed to overcome this addiction to exploration because these treasured gems of insight that I was effectively leaving on the ground and missing, are actually valuable clues to understanding what there is to explore ahead. So if I’m leaving them behind, I’m effectively going against my own exploratory nature.

Thus in becoming aware of their importance, I can possibly overcome my addiction to exploring by paradoxically focusing on their importance to the exploration ahead. So in slowing down to grab this treasure, I may be able to actually speed up my exploration overall.