“There’s a great strength in me showing you a chord or a riff or something, and it’s just going from mind to mind, there’s no paper involved. All of what we did in this very studio would be that. It was really an immediate transference of ideas.”
– Paul McCartney on The Rest is History podcast on YouTube.
This chimes with the Japanese concept of ishin-denshin, heart-to-heart communication, which is central to the Shu Ha Ri way of learning I’ve written about.
Currently reading: Eight Million Ways to Happiness by Hiroko Yoda 📚
Japan is a deeply secular country full of shrines, temples, festivals and ceremonies. This book unpacks the paradox by exploring spiritual life in Japan as it’s actually lived, not the rather warped Western fantasy version.
Atomic notes have a long history
Did previous generations ever think much about atomicity of ideas in their notes? After all, if most people were using notebooks, surely they didn’t need to consider how long their notes should be – they could just keep writing till they were done.
It seems thinking about atomicity was a major element (pun intended) of mathematics and philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Bertrand Russell’s ’logical atomism’ was very influential. Russell said:
“you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else” (‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ 1918: 270).
A similar positivism (where the universe is made of discrete entities rather than one great holism) was a major feature of the efforts to catalogue the world’s knowledge centered on Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ into the 1930s.
Otlet inspired the ‘documentalists’ to reformulate information science in the post-war period, including Vannevar Bush, the originator of the ‘Memex’, which was a precursor to the desktop computer.
Douglas Engelbart further pioneered the way we now use computers. In his paper on augmenting human intellect (1962) he referred to his notes on edge-notched cards as ’thought kernels’, ‘concept packets’ and ‘kernel statements (cards)’ but the established concept behind this was the ‘unit record system’. This had originated in 1888 when H.E. Davidson of Melvil Dewey’s Library Bureau realised he could sell catalogue cards and shelving to commercial businesses to improve their record keeping, previously constrained in ledger books. Engelbart said:
“Mainly what is new is the use of the smaller units of information in restricted-subject sets (notedecks) so that I gain considerable flexibility in the manipulations of my thought products at the level at which I actually work in my minute-by-minute struggle with analytical and formulative thought. Not only do my own thoughts produce results in this fashion but when I digest the writings of another person I find generally anyway that I have extracted from his structure and integrated into my own a specific selection of facts, considerations, ideas etc. Often these different extracted items fit into different places in my structure or become encased in special substructures as I modify or expand his concepts. Extracting such items or kernels and putting each on its own notecard helps this process considerably–the role or position of each such item in the growth of the note structure is independent, and yet if desired all can quickly be isolated and extracted…” (Engelbart, 1962: 57)
The features Engelbart found he couldn’t get from his use of cards – that was precisely what he set out to obtain by means of the digital computer.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying earlier generations thought a lot about atomicity – more even than I had realised!
Now read: The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful
Note: This post started life on Reddit
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in a handy email format which masks how they were all created one by one like little atoms.
I’m very interested in Brett Terpstra’s Mac app, Marked3, launched today on Product Hunt.
It’s a utility that gives markdown documents superpowers. I’m testing this out for a week but already expect to be buying it. Anyone else using it?
#Markdown #MacApps #WritingTools
We are very close to a prompt to fan fiction model of publishing.
I heard this on the Author Update Podcast and it’s a shift I predicted at the start of 2024: Soon we’ll all be writing the books we want to read.
📷 Stormy weather is a great time to take photographs.
Two fascinating articles show quite different sides to Japan:
Deciphering the Hashihara Castle Town Map: The Imaginary Town of MOTOORI Norinaga
#CorporateCulture #JapaneseHistory #LongReads
Watched: Resurrection 🍿
An amazing experience. More fragmented than Bi Gan’s previous movies, but easily as engaging. There were many nods to cinema history, and an article by Xinyuan Wang helped. Essential viewing, and not just for the virtuoso 30-minute-long single shot near the end.
Some books on writing:
Hidalgo, César A. 2025. Infinite Alphabet: and The Laws Of Knowledge. Allen lane.
Fletcher, Angus. 2022. WonderWorks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories. London: Swift Press.
Smith, Emma. 2023. Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers. Penguin Books.
The expert’s trap is where you start thinking of yourself as having gone beyond the need to learn anything new.
What did the legendary Zen maverick Ikkyū Sōjun teach about overcoming the expert’s trap? Find out in The Paradox of Mastery.
#ShuHaRi #Learning #Buddhism #ContinuousLearning #Japan
The Paradox of Mastery: Why the Expert Must Remain a Beginner
A Zen Buddhist master hands his successor a formal certificate of mastery. The successor burns it. Why?
No, it’s not a Zen koan but it almost could be.
The name for such a certificate in Japanese is inka. This word might be translated as a ‘seal of approval’, but it’s hardly that straightforward.
In the original transcripts of Shunryu Suzuki’s teachings, the foundation for his influential book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, he describes the inka as both profound and vacuous at the same time.
The inka, this formal paper, might represent decades of practice, but it also subtly indicates the need to abandon the very idea of mastery. If you’re an intellectual hunting for a hidden formula, the paper might appear to you as a riddle to be solved. But to the practitioner who inhabits “beginner’s mind” (shoshin), there’s no clever secret to be interpreted, it’s just a transparent occasion for a sincere “Thank you.”
Westerners might be tempted or conditioned to treat the inka like a diploma. Is it proof you’ve arrived? Is it a trophy? Or is it a kind of finish line? In fact, the moment you view the paper as a “result” like this, you’ve fallen into the expert’s trap.
##Expertise Closes the Mind
The expert’s trap is where you start thinking of yourself as having gone beyond the need to learn anything new.
Imagine a master chef in a restaurant with a once-great reputation that’s now on the slide. They’ve cooked that signature dish a thousand times. The knife work is flawless. Their timing is impeccable. But somewhere along the way, they stopped tasting. These days they plate up by means of muscle memory, not joie d’esprit. They season by formula. The dish is technically perfect but spiritually dead. This sense that it’s all been done before? That’s the expert trap.
Or consider a concert pianist. They play Chopin and Bach with a technical precision that sets critics agog, yet to the audience the performance feels mechanical and airless. Though they hit every note and these notes reach the ears, they just don’t make it as far as the heart. This is what happens when expertise goes rigid and calcifies – and this is the expert trap.
Suzuki warned: “In the expert’s mind there are few possibilities.” As we solidify our knowledge, the mind loses its inherent fluidity. We stop seeing what’s in front of us because we’re too busy recognizing patterns we’ve seen before. Conventional expertise becomes empty in the worst sense: not the fertile emptiness of Zen, but the closed system of someone who thinks they already know what there is to know. That’s the expert’s trap, right there.
Mastery Means Returning to Innocence
Skill in itself isn’t the problem. In Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters I introduced a time-honoured map of the learning journey: first you follow rules (Shu), then you break them (Ha), and finally you transcend them (Ri). You never abandon the rules, though. Instead, you internalise them. That’s why improvisation is bewildering. To a beginner, improv can seem like an impossible freedom from all convention. But a jazz musician must master scales deeply before they can improvise freely. Improvisation may sound like the free–expression of a beginner, but paradoxically only an expert can do it justice.
True expertise is the Ri stage. Technique becomes so ingrained that it disappears. And the expert returns to the spontaneous state of the beginner. They’ve travelled full circle. Their beginner’s mind is now informed by ten thousand hours of practice, but it remains open, curious and alive.
The master and the beginner see with the same freshness.
The master simply climbed a mountain to return to the valley.
That’s the journey out of the expert’s trap.
Why did Ikkyū Burn the Certificate ?
The ultimate expression of this came from the iconoclastic Zen master Ikkyū Sōjun. Last year, I visited Lake Biwa, the legendary location where Ikkyū heard the cry of a crow, which jogged him to attain enlightenment. Despite plenty of modern development on the lakeshore, the lake itself remains a vast, still place. And in many places it still looks much as it might have in Ikkyū’s day. It’s still a fitting backdrop for a mind stripping away illusions.
When his teacher presented him with the inka, Ikkyū famously trampled on it. Then, as though that wasn’t enough, he tore it to pieces and threw it in the fire. By burning the ‘proof’ of his mastery, he demonstrated the secret that true realization can’t be commodified or archived. It exists only in the living moment, in the quality of attention you bring right now. Despite how it might look to us, the burning wasn’t an insult to his teacher. Rather, it showed he understood at a deeper level.
I took this photo of Lake Biwa from the Eastern slopes of Mount Heiai. On this lake the maverick monk Ikkyū attained enlightenment - in legend at least.
Try This Today
OK, so what practical difference does this make? Today, choose one skill where you consider yourself proficient. Your profession. A hobby. Even something simple like how you make your morning coffee. Approach it as if you know nothing. Try performing it with your non-dominant hand. Or ask a child to show you their approach. Or read an introductory tutorial as if for the first time.
Notice what you’ve stopped seeing because you ‘already know.’ Does your expert ego resist? Does it feel foolish, a waste of time? Or do you catch a glimpse of the strange wonder of not knowing? The possibilities that only appear when you release your grip on certainty?
You might well be an expert. You might well posses certificates to prove it (that you haven’t burned), or you might have many hours of experience under your belt. Or maybe the evidence of your expertise lies all around, in the things you’ve built. But today remember this: The inka is just paper. The wisdom lies in burning it. Because expertise is just an opinion. Part of being able to do something really well is knowing how much better still you could become. The mastery is in the continual learning.
Further Reading
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki – A guide to the attitude of shoshin and the foundation for the ideas in this post.
Extraordinary Zen Masters: A Maverick, a Master of Masters, and a Wandering Poet by John Stevens – Includes the definitive biographical account in English of Ikkyū Sōjun’s wild, iconoclastic life.
Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters by Richard Griffiths – An exploration of the stages of mastery and how to move from rigid rules to spontaneous freedom.
Crow with No Mouth (translated by Stephen Berg) – A collection of Ikkyū’s own “crazy cloud” poetry that captures his visceral, non-institutional approach to Zen.
Thanks for reading! If you like this kind of thing, why not subscribe to the weekly email digest?
And you can also buy my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
💬 “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” — Marshall McLuhan
Whether you’re interested in making your own containers for ‘content’ or in challenging the whole paradigm, the key is to create new ways of being human.
Read more: What’s the future of creative work without human intent?
#AmWriting #Creativity #Fediblog #MediaTheory
Memory isn’t a static recording but a constant act of reconstruction. Every time we revisit a note or a book, we are weaving together the original content with our current environment and past self.
“We construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them.”
So how do we decide what’s worth preserving and what we must allow ourselves to forget? Explore the “differential allocation of attentional resources” in this look at the fallibility of memory.
Link: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#CognitiveScience #Philosophy #Memory
Is note-making an “aide memoire” or a replacement for the source? To distill a book into notes on it, is to change our relationship with the original text. Beyond just storing facts we are building a library of our own interpretations. There’s a friction between preservation and occlusion in our digital workflows.
“When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it.”
Read more: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#Zettelkasten #PKM #NoteMaking
There’s a unique magic in the physical bookshelf. It acts as a spatial memory palace where a spine or a colour can trigger a flood of recollection. ‘Remembering What you Read’ looks at why reorganising a library feels like reorganising a mind, and what it really means to be “well-read” in this time of digital summaries and ephemeral content.
“The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me.”
#Bookstodon #HomeLibrary #ReadingLife
Remembering what you read
One of the chief uses of note-making is to help you to remember what you read.
But it’s not as simple as imagining your notes are just an ‘aide memoire’.
When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it. So making notes is inevitably a process of interpretation, which involves the occlusion of the original work, albeit in the name of preserving it.
Psychologists, including Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, authors of Memory Lane: The perfectly imperfect ways we remember (Princeton UP, 2025) believe “we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them”.
So when we re-read our notes, does that mean we’re reconstructing our memories of the book, or just the memories of our notes? These elements in time are all intertwined: the content of the book itself, the environment in which we read it in the first place, the environment of the place where the notes were made, the notes themselves, and the circumstances in which, later, perhaps much later, we recollect all these factors by re-reading the notes in a new context.
And you do actually remember at least some of what you’ve read. Your reading, or a part of it anyway, sticks in your memory in ineffable ways. Without thinking about it, you have been engaging in what literary scholar Andrew Elfenbein calls ’the differential allocation of attentional resources.’ But how?
This cat has allocated his attentional resources, differentially.
Yesterday I spent a little while looking over the bookshelves in our house, reminding myself of some the books I’ve read and noticing what I haven’t read yet. It was an odd experience because what I remembered of each book varied widely.
I remembered many of the titles, and seeing their spines was a prompt to remember their contents. A surprising number of books I’d forgotten I had ever read, but seeing them again enabled my memories of their contents to come flooding back. A few books I had no memory of having read, even though I’m pretty sure I must have done. And a few more books I was convinced I had never actually owned and vaguely remember thinking I ought to buy a copy.
I suspect the memory-aiding features of the bookshelf itself are qualitatively different from those of a plain list of the books in that bookshelf. The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me. It might explain why I get frustrated when someone reorganises these books: they’re literally reorganising my memory.
Now I’m minded to take photos of these shelves, so that as I dispose of my books (it’s a working library after all) I can at least look back on how they used to be.
All this got me wondering: what does it mean to be ‘well-read’ when you can only partially remember what you’ve read?
Perhaps being well-read is really only something that can emerge in your writing, not as something you carry around with you in your memory. Or is it about the way you weave your reading into your conversation? These days it seems as though being well-read might just be a mark of someone washed up from a previous era, before there were mobile phones and AI summaries of everything.
Scan your own shelves today. Is there a book staring back at you that you have no memory of reading? Or one where the spine alone brings the whole story back? I’d love to hear about the books that have stayed with you, or about the ones that vanished entirely.
If our notes eventually replace the books themselves, we are essentially building a library of our own interpretations. Does this feel like a loss of the original work to you, or a necessary step in making the ideas your own? How do you decide what is worth ‘preserving’ in your notes, and what do you allow yourself to forget?
In an age of instant AI summaries, the slow act of reading and note-making feels almost counter-cultural. Do you find that digital tools change how you remember what you read? Or do you still find that the physical presence of a book, its size and colour, its place on a shelf, is what makes the memory stick? I’d like to know about your own ‘memory-aiding’ systems in the comments.
Meanwhile, here’s a podcast about what we remember, having first read:
What we remember after reading, with Andrew Elfenbein | How To Read Podcast
And here’s a podcast about the fallibility of memory, and why that might actually be a good thing:
Memory Lane | Princeton UP Ideas Podcast
I’ve written a lot on making notes, including:
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Three worthwhile modes of note-making (and one not-so-worthwhile).
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Making notes will aid your short-term memory, even when you haven’t got one.
Thanks for reading! If you like this kind of thing, why not subscribe to the weekly email digest?
And you can also buy my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
ADHD: not straightforwardly a dysfunction.
💬 “It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information”.
– Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Aeon.
💬 “We need to build digital worlds worth protecting.”
— Dr Krista Fisher, on the real manosphere. Womens Agenda
Tsundoku status alert.
