For years I thought SpongeBob was a talking Weet-bix. I couldn’t understand why he was celled SpongeBob or how he could live underwater without turning to mush. Clearly there’s something wrong with me. I bet you always just thought he was a sponge
Why are some teachings a 'secret'?
Shigehiko Toyama’s book Shiko No Seirigaku (1983), published in English as The Art of Organising Thoughts (Penguin, 2026), includes a comment on the ‘secret teachings’ of traditional Japanese schools of learning:
“Secret teachings are secret for a reason. You need to do your best to hide them from even your most beloved student. Eventually the student will give up on trying to be taught the secret and start to wonder how they can instead steal it from their master.” (p.14)
The key insight here is that merely learning everything the master knows isn’t enough. The student who hangs forever on their teacher’s every word will remain forever a student. They will always require someone to show them what there is to learn. But there is a crucial threshold to be crossed, where the student works out how to steal the knowledge they seek — in other words, to find it for themselves, despite the resistence. As Toyama says:
“The student who has committed to stealing that which their master does not wish to freely impart discovers that they have developed the ability to acquire new pieces of information and knowledge under their own steam.”
This way of thinking about the value of ’secret teachings’ puts a new spin on the understanding of anthropologist David Graeber about the authority of the teacher.
“What he liked, he said, was self-subverting authority, authority which undermines its own basis. He gave the example of a teacher: A teacher knows something useful to their student, and so they have a natural authority; but if they do their job well, at the end of the process the student knows what the teacher knows, and their authority is spent. The hierarchy is flattened, and no further unequal power can accrue. The student is changed, and so is the world.”
— James Bridle, ‘Benchma(r)king’. Emergence.
Toyama’s insight is that the end of a student’s learning process is not simply to know what the teacher knows, as though there was a bucket of knowledge to be poured from the head of the teacher to fill up the head of the student. No, the end of a student’s learning is to know how the teacher knows, to know how to steal the ’secret’ knowledge the world hides but doesn’t ultimately withhold from a determined seeker. It’s this effectual desire to learn that propels the learner from the Shu stage of learning (imitation or emulation), through the Ha stage (assimilation or adaptation), and into the Ri stage (transcendence). This is why learning how to learn is the most important aspect of the learning journey.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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“What he liked, [anthropologist David Graeber] said, was self-subverting authority, authority which undermines its own basis. He gave the example of a teacher: A teacher knows something useful to their student, and so they have a natural authority; but if they do their job well, at the end of the process the student knows what the teacher knows, and their authority is spent. The hierarchy is flattened, and no further unequal power can accrue. The student is changed, and so is the world.”
— James Bridle, ‘Benchma(r)king’. Emergence.
#shuhari #learning #teaching #change
📷 Sunset at the mouth of the Shoalhaven River, NSW..
#photography #Australia #LandscapePhotography #Sunset
What comes after the golden age of prescriptive non-fiction?
Tim Ferriss, the author of self-help classics such as The Four Hour Work Week, noted a very sharp drop in his book sales since the arrival of AI back in late 2022. He viewed this as a real turning point for the ‘self-help’ genre of writing. He asked, ‘Has AI already killed nonfiction?’ and concluded:
“The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh. Sure, there will be temporary outliers, but the trend line points in one direction.” – Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?
The solution? He suggested the way forward is to return to the basics:
- Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.
- Surprise and delight them. Overdeliver again and again.
- Success!
I don’t know that the work of Tim Ferriss is a clear bellwether for the entire genre. He’s a unicorn and there will always be a few of those. My feeling is that the industry ran a little ahead of itself in treating self-help books as stand-alone products in their own right. I always saw them as derivative, secondary products. The books were never the main event. The main event was always none other than the author. People want a direct connection with a real expert who has actually been successful at the exact thing they’re writing about – or at least knowledgeable. The gold standard, the most desirable activity, would be a personal audience with that expert. Failing that, they want to meet the expert in some kind of face-to-face encounter of learning, exchange or connection. And only then does the book become an item of value. The book is always a proxy for the personalised encounter; it’s not really the primary expression of the encounter itself. The book is a kind of souvenir of the experience, which works, curiously enough, even if you didn’t actually take part in the face-to-face version.
When I ask artist and lecturer Linn Phyllis Seeger about how microblogging might benefit art created today, she tells me “it’s really a question of how to carve out alternative aesthetics and posting practices through formats and platforms that have not been commodified yet”. — Is microblogging the next big art movement? | Plastered
The swamp and the swamp monster: On seeing like a data structure
As human knowledge fragments into trillions of data-points hidden in unreadable databases, there’s a sense of something — legibility, coherence, correlation — dissolving or liquefying. In a very interesting article, [Fear of oozification], the consultant Venkatesh Rao, clarifies this process by naming it, and he charts a path to help us learn “how to stop worrying, and learn to love the ooze”.
Oozification? What are you talking about? Well, here’s Venkatash’s working definition:
“Oozification is the process of recursively replacing systems based on numerous larger building blocks, governed by many rules, with ones based on fewer, smaller building blocks, governed by fewer rules, thereby increasing the number of evolutionary possibilities and lowering the number of evolutionary certainties.”
Oozification is an evocative but perhaps clumsy term. If you don’t like it, you can look at it another way: the triumph of data abstraction and indirection. The authors of another worthwhile article, ‘[Seeing like a data structure]’, offer a clear, practical illustration of the process:
The Destiny of Your Notes Depends on Their Data Model
It feels a little overwhelming to observe the sheer number of note-making apps that promise to “revolutionize your thinking” or something similarly impressive.
I came across a website called the [Markdown Handbook], which lists about forty markdown editors and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
If you’ve felt it’s too much, you’re not alone. Most of these tools offer endless variations of the same features, minor tweaks disguised as major innovations. We have an abundance of options, yet precious little genuine progress.
And with AI ‘vibe-coding’ the field is expanding beyond all comprehension. Everyone can build their own writing app now and some of them look pretty good too. Joan Westenberg’s app [Kerouac] is just one example of how good the results can be.
Recently I read Matt Brown’s essay “[Your Data Model is Your Destiny],” which explores how software companies are shaped by their fundamental data structures. Now he’s an ‘early-stage investor’, writing for a tech start-up audience, but I got it into my head that his principle very much applies to note-making too. Even for something as simple as making notes, the underlying data model, the way your knowledge is stored and connected, determines a tool’s power and longevity.
“do not research simply to decorate your writing with impressive names and references. Research should extend your thinking, not replace it.” — Alexis McElroy, The Muse & The Melody, How to Turn Your Thoughts Into Something Worth Reading. Substack
nvALT is back from the dead?
Surprising news that Brett Terpstra has resurrected the venerable note making app nvALT. Yes indeed, nvALT is back from the dead.
True, we’ve been waiting what seems like centuries for the long-promised, upgraded and massively improved version, nvULTRA to appear, but since it isn’t yet available, at least now there’s an interim solution, a revamped nvALT.
I expect almost everyone who might need a simple note-making app that plays nicely with Markdown files has already long since moved on to other options, such as any one of many text editors, or MarkEdit on the Mac, or nvENVY, or The Archive or Zettlr, or Obsidian or Bear — or you name it.
Still, it’s nice to see nvALT, the (almost) original and (possibly) the best, back in action. Maybe it’ll also encourage a few people to check out Brett Terpstra’s app Marked3, which for anyone working with Markdown files is rather useful. It’s billed as a ‘Markdown preview’ app but it does a whole lot more than that, including things I didn’t know were possible1. And I can confirm that the latest release of nvALT works well with Marked’s ‘streaming preview’ feature.
A while ago, Christian of zettelkasten.de produced a handy guide for using nvALt as a Zettel note archive, though the specialised Zettelkasten apps, The Archive and Zettlr add features that some fans of this approach to making notes may well find indispensable. But since life is complicated enough as it is, I’m an advocate of using the simplest tools you can get away with for A minimal approach to writing notes, and nvALT is useful, fast and simple.
And talking of simplicity and of the (almost) original, the real OG, the venerable Notational Velocity, has been receiving updates recently too, after a long dormancy. It seems to have come back to life with a new release after a remarkable fifteen year gap.
Interesting that these note-making apps still seem useful and relevant after all these years. And hold onto your hat: for the long-awaited nvUltra release, apparently Brett is ‘shooting for 2026 still’.
Now read:
- Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes.
- So many note-taking apps in the app graveyard - but not all are zombies.
- A minimal approach to writing notes.
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Just now I discovered Marked3 will verify your hyperlinks for you and can even do so automatically. ↩︎