(2024nov24) I’m in the process of once again trying to… organize my blog. It occurs to me that the desire paths post might be the best place to start trying something that I want to start trying. So… for starters, I’ll list out a bunch of other posts in this cluster:
- thinking easy, information architecture hard
- jetpacks
- notesprawl
- people-shaped
- hyperthreading
- comfy
- do less
Why do I make that list? Am I going to contextualize it? I don’t precisely know yet. If it were possible, I’d like all of those posts to be one post. So maybe that’s the next step, I should re-read each of those posts and then pull out whatever feels relevant from each.
But wait… I’ve already made this a Category, so you can see all the posts in the category by going to the category page (which I might rename, currently it’s 1desirepaths).
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(2023sep25) Was just talking with @neuranne about creativity and ideas and I found myself naturally bringing up the idea of paving the desire paths in the context of… stories that I often bring up in conversation. I wish I had a better log of them. One that I brought up in a recent conversation was the anecdote of the discovery of Stainless Steel. I’m now also reminded that I talk a lot about the origin of Sony. And about Victor Wooten. I’m wondering now if a part of me feels a little averse to the idea of making my references so visible. There’s another part of me that does want to do it, so I’m internally conflicted and there’s probably a negotiation that needs to happen in order for me to make progress.
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[original thread] my twitter philosophy, which informs my content philosophy, which is informs my life philosophy, is something like… pay attention to the sticky riffs in your conversations, and embellish them, and then use them as landmarks to navigate by, and pave the desire paths.
people ask questions like “how are you so confident” and “how do you remember all your tweets” – it’s all sort of the same thing. I’m confident because I know my stuff, I know my stuff because I have this magnificent memory-palace, it works because I allow the emotions to guide.
once you have a few good riffs or talking points or whatever you wanna call them, those are like buoys or lighthouses that you can navigate by. they are like major cities in a trade network. you can build out everything in between them. connecting them creates additional wealth.
and here’s the really wild thing: this is a multiplayer co-op game. we don’t have to do it alone. we can build desire paths to each other’s thoughts. and all of us are enriched by the wealth created by the trade.
If we do it really, really well, I would actually bet that Twitter could ascend into legendary status relative to all the other social networks. 50 years from now this part of Twitter could be looked back on as THE place to be, across the whole Internet.
I’m not sure that anybody who works at Twitter even realizes just how powerful the potential of this is.
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