Monday Memo #45
Create a serendipity engine.
The Monday memo is food for thought to fuel your week.
Hello everyone,
I’ve been tinkering with my reading lately. I like to read a lot of nonfiction books: self-help, science, history and so on. I often find myself reading several books at once.
Instead of finishing one book and moving to the next, what I’ve been doing recently is reading them one chapter at a time. I read a chapter, then put the book down, pick up the next book in the stack, and read a chapter.
I take notes in my journal as I read, sometimes transcribing things verbatim, sometimes interjecting my own thoughts, sometimes a bit of both.
What do these books have in common? Nothing, except that they were all interesting to me at the time I started reading them. Do they have common threads? Maybe not naturally, but my curiosity and interest is the one thread that holds them all together. A topic mentioned in one book shows up elsewhere, but with a different flavor and perspective.
This practice is a kind of serendipity generator. It creates random collisions of viewpoints, theories, facts, and perspectives that are uniquely interesting to me. This habit continually surprises me with the kinds of combinations that come up.
Over time, as I start noticing connections that captivate and fascinate me, I get a better sense of what sparks my interests and curiosity.
Exercise.
Here’s your exercise for the week. Create your own serendipity engine. Make a stack of books that are interesting to you. Try reading one chapter in each book, moving through your stack, making notes and capturing your thoughts as you go.
Notice the connections and combinations that come up.
See what happens.
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