Year: 2025

“Although information overload is frequently discussed in the media—which help cause it—our dilemma is not that we receive too much information. We don’t receive anywhere near the quantity of data it takes to overload our neurons; our minds are capable of processing and analyzing many gigabits of data per second—a lot more data than any of today’s supercomputers can process and act on in real time. We feel flooded because we’re getting information UNFILTERED, unsorted, and unframed. We lack ways to select what’s important. The design task is to make information digestible, not to keep it out.”

John Thackara, In The Bubble

When you can filter and sort what your seeing and give it a larger contextual framework to sit within, suddenly everything comes into view.

So it’s not about not creating small, unfiltered daily notes, similar to what people use social media for. These are essential as a foundation, forming the base of your mountain.

But what is essential is to create other filtered perspectives that do give you a larger view of what you’re expressing and playfully working towards.

What is this filter, this lens, that you’re creating and constructing?

It’s your worldview.

BTW what’s also interesting is how Tim Denning has named his publication Unfiltered. In effect, if you want to step out of your current worldview, you have to let go of the lens of it and its filters, stepping down into an unfiltered flow of information. Yet to make sense of a new worldview, a new perspective, an a newer way of being, you need to climb back out of the flow again and make some structured sense of it, creating a new filter in the process.

This mirrors what Dave Gray talks about in his book Liminal Thinking, when he says you need to step out of your bubble of belief, down the ladder of inference and then up the same ladder of inference to effective stand within a newer, larger worldview.

Once you’re high agency your mind becomes like a filter. You have one true purpose and everything that doesn’t align with it goes in the trash.

It means you live true to who you are and know what you stand for. You’re congruent with who you are, so you act authentically and people bizarrely praise you for this authenticity.

Tim Denning, The Secret Life of People with High Agency

Something else I realized this morning, as to why I feel stuck in articulating myself, is that I’m trying to build a system while trying to use it at the same time.

What I mean by this is that I don’t just want to write a book that relays everything I know about the future of work, creativity, vertical development, and how life is a MMORPG.

I want to create a system that shows others how my entire framework of how life is an MMORPG emerged itself using my own life’s growth and development over time as an example itself.

Like I want to show how after reading books and papers on the future of work, creativity, and vertical development, I started seeing connections and synchronicities with my past experiences building communities online around video games like World of Warcraft.

But I don’t want to talk about this in a book as a story which people have to following linearly. I want people to be able to explore my growth and development as a non-linear, concept map, whereby they can click and follow the links of thoughts and ideas, as though they were exploring a larger world(view) within me.

But now I realize I can’t do this because I didn’t blog or journal all of my atomic thoughts over time on my website, thus allowing me to go back and connect them all up and showing how they formed this larger framework.

So the best I can do for now is to create a sort of book, a linear expression of my work.

In other words, work with what you’ve got and what you’re capable of achieving now.

Well, unless, I can figure out a way to reflect back upon my life and quickly express the key moments and memories of them, thus allowing me to connect and link those together into this larger framework. Sort of like how a psychologist does when working with a new patient or maybe even like how a branding and identity specialist might work with a new client to understand them.

Hmm, sounds like I need to do some serious playing.

I was reflecting upon my old website this morning (which is currently archived, although I may import its content again in the future) and I realized something. So much of the best stuff I’ve researched over the years is not within it. It’s still stuck in my head.

Why?

Primarily I wasn’t in the mindset of sharing knowledge as I was acquiring it but rather I just shared when I had larger insights. Put another way, when blogging, there’s always seems to be this focus on long form writing rather than short form writing (which is more popular on social networks).

Secondly, and more importantly though, a lot of the larger insights I was having at the time, I couldn’t fully make sense of and thus figure out where they “fit into things” in terms of how to categorize them.

This second point, I think, is extremely important because it touches upon something that I’m realizing more and more, as I journey from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind. And it relates to something Steve Jobs said.

So you often won’t make sense of things and understand them in the moment of first experiencing them but instead you‘ll make sense of them and understand them in reflecting back upon them over time.

Yet this realization pretty much goes against most personal knowledge management approaches (at least what I’ve read) and even website practices. You create categories and tags upon your website and when you add new posts, you categorize and tag them. This, however, assumes you know where the content fits into the larger context of your website.

But what if you don’t know how something fits into the bigger picture because you don’t fully understand it yet, since you haven’t made sense of it yet?

For example, before my Life as an MMORPG framework emerged, it was just bits and pieces at first. Then patterns emerged and then I saw relationships between the patterns, thus revealing the bigger picture overall.

But here’s the thing. If the sense-making and understanding occurs afterwards upon reflection, where do you keep these thoughts and experiences in the interim, until the sense-making occurs later?

In other words, these are liminal thoughts, with no solid ground or space to be contained within yet.

Yet what’s saddest of all though is that if I had written way more short form posts, highlighting these key moments of insight and connection on my journey, these would have effectively been the building blocks of my framework with which I could have connected together via links to provide a bigger picture of how my work emerged naturally over time on my website.

And in the process, it would show how things often don’t make sense going forwards, as you stumble around trying to make sense of things in the moment, almost like you feel lost in a maze, but rather by reflecting backwards.

That above anything else is what transitioning to a Self-Transforming Mind is trying to teach me about the struggles of articulating my work.

It’s telling me to let go and trust that even though things often won’t make sense in the moment, they will make sense later upon reflection, as the insights emerge over time.

Or put another way. Everything has a place and a space, even though you may not be able to see that place and space yet.

And this doesn’t just apply to what you’re working on but with regards to your very self as well. In other words, while you might feel lost now, a larger purpose can emerge over time.

BTW two examples that I think relate to this are as follows. The first relating to individual thoughts within you forming ideas and the second being individual people within society forming newer systems.

Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking website which relates to idea emergence occurring from small atomic notes that connect and link up, creating larger ideas.

Berkana’s Two Loops Model, created by Deborah Frieze and Margaret Wheatley, which shows how when a dominant system is dying out, a newer emerging system usually is born from individual outcasts from the older system becoming pioneers that connect up and create the new system over time.