🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (21 tweets)
a friend told me that I seem to have an uncommon ability to retain/process large amounts of info I think this is... kinda true, but also... I think people in general underestimate their own capacity for this what's the difference? I suspect most people have "too many folders"
first of all I actually *fail* to retain/process a lot of info. ask my wife. I am *extremely* scatterbrained. this isn't a humblebrag. I have many of the classic ADHD symptoms and it costs me. it just so happens that when I'm good, I'm really good. so there's a sort of illusion
If I were forced to summarize my "method" in a soundbite: I play "association games". I use the canvas of my life as a living memory palace. I "sort" everything through the lens of my interests and curiosities. While I'm a classic "ENTP", this is actually a game of emotions
my hypothesis for *WHY* my recognition is so good: I develop precise and memorable snapshots of my feelings about any concept or idea. It then becomes pretty trivial to pattern-match my feelings for one thing with my feelings for some other thing https://t.co/uPoy7Qw00j
I’ve basically taught myself to manage my ADHD with notes and threads. My “schedule intelligence” (deadlines, calendars, checklist) is terrible but my recognition and web-jumping is fantastic, so I spent something like a decade using the latter to build an elaborate mind-palace https://t.co/A2E4okufzH
all things are just made up of other things. and things have a discernable rhythm and rhyme to them. random eg: math and theatre might seem as wildly different as two things could possibly be, and/but they're also both really just "relationship studies" https://t.co/Wym7S0OJaF
Practically everything is just a bunch of stuff. And the stuff is made up of other stuff, and there’s relationships between them. You take one thing and you fiddle around with it, try it in different contexts, move it up and down and turn it inside out and you start to understand
I think an important thing is that I always relate everything back to my own life, back to my own experience, tastes, curiosities. When I was a kid I would read more randomly because I didn't know what I was into. But now I encounter randomness simply *by* pursuing my interests
eg, I ended up learning about mexican history because I was curious to learn about a packet of garlic chilli sauce that was in my house. now garlic chilli sauce is much more meaningful and interesting to me. I turn everything around me into talismans https://t.co/kjhcCzW1kB
The first question, of course, is what are chillies even? how many kinds of chillies are there? what is the definition of a chilli? let's dig into the etymology of the related words ok so chili – aztec word capsicum – french botanist word pepper – maybe sanskrit/persian https://t.co/LLJ6I6L6Y3
and you can see from the above eg – one of my core interests is language, another is history, both are extremely intertwined, and me studying anything (including say, jukeboxes) is me simultaneously building out my history + language graphs https://t.co/gtlSMZeEJw
why was I even reading up about jukeboxes? well they were featured pretty prominently in a video game I used to play as a kid. this is what I mean by "living memory palace" – everything new ties back onto something old, every bit in my head gets richer https://t.co/93SY4n8YmU
Oh yeah this reminds me: my first introduction to jukeboxes as a concept was in the Moonwalker video game, which is in turn a reference to the Smooth Criminal music video. It looks similar enough to the Wurlitzer but I’m not totally sure https://t.co/HGTGSNkG0j https://t.co/PFvWwBYqBG https://t.co/NoI5yHCRQL
a random fact in isolation withers and dies quick a fact that's connected to something I care about lives longer a fact that ties together 2 "separate" things I care about? ie, a fact that creates a relationship? 90%+ chance I remember it forever https://t.co/7kfVqdvXX6
circling back: when I say "too many folders", I mean that each "project" is too *isolated*. to learn anything, you have to care about it. I've spent my whole life asking obsessively "WHY should I care about this? what does this really MEAN?" I was insufferable for 20+ years, lol
but it's paid off! I'm now p good at figuring out why I should care about something, and what it really means. and, delightfully, when I do this in public, turns out thousands of people are also interested in what I care about and what I think things mean take that, teachers
another way of framing all of this is that it's really about taste, and taste is really about feelings... https://t.co/ESX53zrYZG
and we live in a world where people who are in tune with their feelings are described as geniuses, when really, most children start out that way until we discourage them and condition them to PAY ATTENTION https://t.co/mohvG5boDo
Been telling a few friends lately (was the topic of my previous tinyletter) about my sense that feelings are under-appreciated, under-considered, under-articulated, misunderstood, misrepresented - & all of that is a massive bottleneck. To be in tune with your feelings is sublime https://t.co/i9DNKL9f5R
this whole thread circles around familiar territory for me but I think the slightly surprising/interesting thing for me to realize is how much of it is really about feelings. it's the thing that we don't really teach. we don't really care how kids feel about what they're learning
my "competitive advantage" in "learning" (hate that phrasing, but ugh) is that I care very, very much about how I feel. It just feels wrong to force myself to do things that I don't feel like doing. And I've tried, and I can't do it. @visabrain is too stubborn for me to coerce
@visabrain so if there's sth that "needs" doing, & I don't feel like it, I sometimes spend weeks in contortions processing that. does it REALLY need doing, then? if yes, why am I not feeling it? I try to make adjustments until I DO feel like doing it. this looks v unproductive from outside
@visabrain but this process basically made me who I am. it gives me a lightness of being, a measured confidence in my own taste, a sincerely high regard for my own opinion. I'm just the janitor here, a custodian of a process within me that goes beyond me. can get quasi-religious about this
@visabrain interesting how the phrase "I care very, very much about how I feel" sounds like such a selfish thing to say it's ironic, because it might just be the #1 way in which I enrich other people's lives. I demonstrate by example that you can do it too https://t.co/VMsz3w74cI
@visabrain in conclusion, embody your feelings, you fuckers!!! https://t.co/7JJRuEo8PN
@visabrain 🧘🏾♂️ https://t.co/XewTZzFgdY