Learning From Strategic Gambling: How to Have More Valuable Ideas
You never know the value of the idea unless you execute it. If you never roll the dice, you never know if you hit the jackpot or come up empty. But even in a game of luck, there are skills and strategies that skew the game in your favor.
Today, we will explore the relationship and the balance of luck, skill, and strategies in the creative process.
Working with ideas is constant exploration. Even executing an idea is yet another explorative action. The creative process seems to be more closely connected to divergent thinking. Being creative seems mainly to be about coming up with and skillfully exploring many different possibilities. Convergent thinking, thinking about the one correct answer, doesn’t get the love it deserves. In the end, you need both to be creative. You need to generate possibilities, but you also need to choose the best one as well.
If you are writing, an easy way to understand both thinking processes is to map them to writing and editing. When you write, you create material; when you edit, you work for the best version of it. You first create possibilities and then choose the best one.
The commonality between the two thinking processes is that you try, and each try has an uncertain outcome. In both, a little bit of luck is involved. There is always a dice in your hand, and you have to throw it. Both thinking processes are involved in longer-enduring thinking endeavors. You switch back and forth between them.
Let’s bring it down with an example of my work.
Convergent thinking was finished. For many years, I was a high-intensity guy when it came to endurance training. Low-intensity training, I thought, was just less effective and time-consuming compared to higher-intensity training.
Divergent thinking started. Then I came across the Zone 2 craze (basically low-intensity training), was open to reconsidering my position, and did my research. I rolled some dice by collecting different positions and updating my knowledge to the most recent research. By evaluating each piece of knowledge, I metaphorically checked the dots on the dice.
Until now, I have mainly expanded my knowledge by integrating others’ thinking and ideas into my own.
A spark happened. My research led me to reconsider my former fixation on high-intensity training. Metaphorically speaking, I grabbed some dice to throw. So, I thought about the implementation and the training stimulus (training intensity and volume). I wasn’t convinced by the popular depiction of proper low-intensity training.
I broke the idea of low-intensity training down to its first principles, such as muscle contraction, cumulative time under tension, the total amount of muscle mass used during training, and the like. I rolled the dice, and I got some dots: I broke away from the orthodoxy in two ways:
- The biking, the most popular choice, was in multiple ways inferior to many other modes of low-intensity training. There were other options that used more muscle mass and involved physiologically more beneficial movements.
- The idea that low-intensity training has to be done with a high volume (3-4 hours per week) and in longer sessions (more than 45 minutes per session) seemed to be wrong.
Breaking low-intensity training down to the first principles was me throwing the dice. Getting the chance to improve the current orthodoxy in two ways was seeing that I got a lot of dots on the dice. I used first-principle thinking as an exploration technique here.
I then concluded the divergent thinking phase by coming up with various modes of exercise and ran each one through my newly created categorisation method for endurance exercise.
Convergent thinking phase. Now, I had several tasks that weren’t about creating possibilities but about finding the best one in a sea of possibilities. My goal was then to create a specific set of exercise modes that were the best tools for low-intensity training.
Each trial of implementing the various exercise modes into training plans was another roll of the dice.
The research ended with expanded knowledge and, more importantly, an improved and expanded toolkit of training methods and techniques. My clients get an improved approach to general training, particularly endurance training.
Rolling the Dice While Working With Your Zettelkasten
All of the above happened in my Zettelkasten. Here are the distinct phases, each of which offers you some unique opportunities to throw the dice.
Spark Phase. You have an idea. You don’t know anything about the idea. But you have a feeling. It is as if you feel whether there are few or many dice in your hand. An idea that inspires and excites you puts many dice in your hand.
This can happen anywhere and therefore introduces the problem of capturing:
- How do you capture ideas when you are traveling, commuting, walking your dog, talking to your spouse, etc.? It is not just about the technical execution, but also a question of lifestyle design and other aspects of your life.
- How do you deal with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)?
- How do you empty the inbox?
- How do you capture ideas while capturing another idea in your Zettelkasten?
- Do you switch to your Zettelkasten or put a spontaneous idea in an inbox while you are writing?
Manifestation Phase. You write the idea down or think about it. You are throwing the dice, sometimes one by one, sometimes slowly, sometimes in rapid succession. Count the dots: Is the idea actually valuable or not?
If you have a Zettelkasten, you write the idea down in your Zettelkasten. The manifestation can be considered finished when you reach level 2 of atomic note-taking.
The Crafting Phase. The idea of the idea is finished. If we explore the idea further, we have another chance to throw the dice. The number of dice we now have depends on the value we got in the previous step. Obviously, you want to explore an idea further only if you feel it is promising.
The Zettelkasten offers several benefits if you work on the idea in a note within it.
- Most technical hurdles are removed to connect your idea with others. Everything is just a couple of clicks away.
- Other ideas in close proximity can serve as inspiration to further develop the idea.
- Putting the idea into a bigger context can trigger further inspiration to develop the idea.
In short, the Zettelkasten will invite you to think with past thinking efforts at your fingertips.
The ability to develop an idea depends heavily on your skills. Skills place dice into your hands.
Let’s circle back to the beginning: Divergent and convergent thinking are the important terms here. Connecting notes would fall under “divergent thinking”. Just connecting your idea to others without exploring each connection deeply is one way of developing possibilities. Links will be introduced like “this reminds me of” or “similar to”, very vague descriptions of the connection between the ideas (for a deeper explanation of link descriptions, see link context).
If you just stated that there is a connection and left the connection unexplored, what you actually did was state there might be a connection. If you link to another idea, and because it reminds you of the current idea, it might be possible that on a second look, the connection doesn’t make that much sense anymore.
The same is true for note creation. If your notes merely contain a couple of statements, the value of the idea is still just a possibility. For an upcoming article, I draw the line between a developed atomic note and an aphorism:
- Aphorism. A small text, containing just a few sentences to point to an idea, rarely, perhaps never, expressing the idea fully.
- Atomic Note. A text aiming at presenting the essence of a single idea, sometimes with a little bit of commentary and written-down meta-cognition. Molecular notes are a special variant. Instead of focusing on a single idea, they focus on the structure of a complex idea, leaving the ideas to the respective atomic notes.
This difference is one of the major reasons many people don’t grasp the magic of their Zettelkasten. Part of the magic is to make your Zettelkasten a store of value. This is not just about extracting value through direct retrieval. The notes are the substance from which you build structures and tools in your Zettelkasten. An aphorism is a pointer to an idea and warrants execution. The value of an aphorism is that it makes you think. In other words, it is a thinking prompt. It is a task that has to be accomplished to create knowledge value. You don’t read Twilight of the Idols by Nietzsche to inform you. You read it to get thinking. On the flipside, you don’t read a manual for your car to get thinking. Instead, you read it to avoid thinking.
The developed atomic note isn’t to get you thinking. It allows you to continue thinking. Getting back to the initial example of my work:
When I research the various endurance-training exercises, I don’t need a starter to think. I want to continue from a solid foundation. When I encounter a new exercise, I don’t want to find notes that prompt me to think. I want a fully developed evaluation tool with rich examples and detailed explanations, available with just one click.
The most value is created in the crafting phase!
The most important reason why you should invest a lot of time into the crafting of developed notes is that this is where you build the skill of knowledge work.
Divergent thinking is the ability to generate possibilities. Convergent thinking is the ability to identify the best possible solution. Divergent thinking is where possibilities are created, whereas convergent thinking is about realising the value.
The creative can generate ideas; the skillful makes them valuable.
An example of such a skill is to make ideas reliable. It depends on your ability to formulate arguments and provide empirical evidence.
Skills need practice, which you only get when you are crafting.
If you think about the three phases, spark, manifestation, and crafting, as levels of depth, each unlocks a deeper layer; it becomes obvious that you want to use each phase as a chance to go deeper. Not going deeper is a serious symptom of a workflow problem.
- You won’t develop valuable ideas, but collect ideas instead.
- You won’t work on your thinking skills.
How to Have Valuable Ideas?
1. Never run out of ideas, so you can throw the dice often. The first step is to always have ideas that you can work with. The most reliable way for that is to process books. Books offer you a thread, a common theme, for quite some time. The goal is not to just capture what is in the books. The capturing is just the jump-off platform for the next steps.
This is a numbers game. The more notes you write, the more chances you get to throw the dice.
2. Make your ideas deep and broad. If you captured an idea, search for connections. Broaden the idea to make it relevant to other ideas. This is standard advice in the Zettelkasten community. One of the benefits of this is that here you create the opportunity to create value. This isn’t just to make the Zettelkasten work. It is a valuable habit in itself.
Deepening the idea seems to get less attention. Here, you develop the idea and make it work. In my work, for example, I explored the idea of low-intensity endurance training in depth. The payoff was improved training plans and methods.
3. Get feedback on your ideas. There is internal and external feedback.
You get internal feedback from your Zettelkasten and your overall workflow. Do the ideas help you with the development of other ideas? Do the ideas help you to create articles, books, podcasts, presentations, etc.? This very article is the product of the idea to view the creative process through the lens of gambling strategy.
You get external feedback from the outside world. Do the ideas help you to solve real-world problems? How do other people reflect back on the value of the idea? This is the final evaluation of the value of ideas.
What’s the verdict then? I’ll let Andy Matuschak start with today’s verdict:
Most people don’t seem to take note-writing very seriously as a skill. For some, that’s because they see it as a simple utility (e.g. Most people use notes as a bucket for storage or scratch thoughts). For others, their indifference may arise because they notice that Note-writing practices are generally ineffective.
But some note-writing practices are vastly more effective than others. It’s possible to become much, much more skilled at writing notes, and that skill translates into valuable output: Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work. Source
I couldn’t agree more. Note-taking is a skill. Atomic note-taking, the core activity of the Zettelkasten Method, is the skill of getting to the essence of an idea. Your note-taking practice can train your mind and develop specific thinking skills.
Just have to go deep.