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A pocket book is an extremely vital tool within my life, it serves the purpose of capturing ideas, thoughts, feelings, all inside of a pocket book.

The idea of starting this website started from an idea from my pocket books. These kinds of thoughts are usually termed as “seedlings” within the Personal Knowledge Management world, it’s a cool metaphor that mostly describes the things that are written in notebooks.

I choose not to keep a phone digital notebook (or Notes App), simply because of the friction between what I want to write of going through the horrendous amount of steps on the phone just to jot down simple things:

• Getting my phone out of my pocket
• Typing in the password
• Finding the Notes app
• Click on an empty note
• Click on the empty space
• Start typing

In contrary, writing in my notebook consists of three simple steps:

• Pull out my notebook (w/ a pen attached of course)
• Open the notebook to an empty page
• Start writing.

Although, it is rather convenient to have it written in a digital format so that it can be quickly expanded on the computer as you may just copy and paste from your app, but I still prefer analog.

Sometimes compromising on a big disadvantage for the advantage of the greater system is the better option. (not sure what this is called, contact me if you do know)

Here are some thoughts and ideas of what I wrote in my notebook that I found quite interesting as I look back at it:

• What if there was a way to view the lives of everyone simultaneously in this current moment? As if there was a screen for every person that showed the world from their eyes all at once? (kind of relates to the Butterfly effect and Domino effect)

• 300 + 60 + 5 days: Possible art piece of everything a person produces and consumes within a year. A large 5x5m canvas of all the “todos” on post-its pasted neatly on a large canvas, all pictures taken, all paper written, all work completed digitally, all water drank, all food eaten, all money spent, everything bought, all wasteful trash (no, not including poop and pee…….)

• What is the seemingly unexplainable (to me) phenomenon after thousands of hours of practice where something something like an intuitive understanding of a subject is developed?

  • For example, I speak English, and form (mostly) proper sentences in English without major grammatical errors, but I haven’t learned grammar before and it seems that I just type in proper grammatical form without trying. How? Is there a point where that “intuitive understanding” just clicks in your head after thousands of hours?

Sometimes the things I jot down are dumb, stupid, and perhaps even crazy (which I won’t write here, because my dignity won’t allow it hahahaha) but it is the fact that the purpose of having a pocket notebook is not to strive for perfection, but as a sandbox for dumb, fun, crazy, stupid, cool ideas.

I encourage and really emphasise to anyone reading this (if anyone…) of the importance of starting their own pocket notebooks, it has been a vital tool for attempting understanding this confusing and overwhelming world around me a little more, and I hope that the benefits it has brought me will be brought to you as well

Happy writing.

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