I have been fascinated by the process of discovering the principles and its implications to experience. Here are some further reflections on the process: I've been quite surprised by an observation that an incomplete note is sometimes of value to somebody else. This is especially intriguing when compared to writing a blog post. While writing a blog post requires a considerable effort, capturing the skeleton of an idea takes me 5% of the blog-post effort. I start to see blogging and capturing the essence of a principle as two quite different things. Blogging—that is, creating a *finished* piece of work—feels quite effortful, while capturing the principle and continuously evolving that principles feels *effortless*. > If it isn’t crystal clear, I am advocating the view that if you find that what you are doing is ridiculously hard for _you,_ it is the wrong thing for you to be doing.  I maintain that you should _not_ have to work significantly harder or faster to succeed today than you had to 50 years ago. A little harder perhaps. Mainly, you just have to drop external frames of reference and trust your internal navigation on a landscape of your own strengths.  It may look like superhuman grit to an outsider, but if it feels like that inside to you, you’re doing something wrong. > —Venkatesh Rao, [The Calculus of Grit](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/08/19/the-calculus-of-grit/) I see that my interests in engineering are quite broad and my work feels effortless when I learn about domains [breadth-first](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadth-first_search) over [depth-first](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth-first_search) . I really need to *capture* the core understanding of the principle, jot it down, have it ready for use and for a possible future deeper research and reflection, and only then move on to another principle. The field of engineering is quite [[Cynefin framework|complex and complicated domain]] and my inuition have been pulling me into different areas. If I want to cover more terrain with the limited resources, I need to go breads-first, and go deeper only when needed. At least this has been my intuitive thinking in the past years. I also see how notes are organically maturing. Starting with a skeleton on January, and a few notes in February and March, encountering the same situation in October, and by November, I have accumulated resources and observations about a given principle. It seems to me that the principles are [[Cynefin framework|emerging from experience]] from the bottom-up. The last observation I want to make is a technological one. I've been writing principles in Obsidian, a Markdown-based note-taking app. And I have to admit, I absolutely love it: - I love the writing experience of Obsidian, including the desktop's and mobile app, the sync, the embedded links, etc. - I own and have control over all the notes. The principles are written in local Markdown files. - For publishing, I use Obsidian Publish. I don't need to spend time on any front-end development, Publish Obsidian works quite well out of the box. This allows me to focus exclusively on the content. >All of the grappling (martial) arts out there, they have moves, but they don't have a clear coherent system that takes you from the beginning, through the middle, to the end of a fight. Jiu-Jitsu does. >... >There's not really a need to do things you are terrified of. Most of the work is on a pretty mundane level. ...The focus of my coaching is to make something which most people would find pretty scary and make it mundane. When you break it down and disect skills into manageable components & train them at a level that nothing overwhelms you, you can get really good in a short period of time. > >—John Danaher, elite BJJ coach --- Further reading: - Carl Rogers - Discovering structure in Experience - Sonke Ahrens - [How to Take Smart Notes](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34507927-how-to-take-smart-notes)