How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think

by Lion Kimbro

Lion emerged from his experiment a changed man. As a result of spending months thinking and writing down his thoughts with a pen, his brain had started to work
in new ways.

Genres: Productivity, Nonfiction

118 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Michael Nielsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific, very unusual book. I read (most of) it ~13 years ago. I find myself coming back to ideas in the book constantly.

Warning: it doesn't fit the model of what a "good" book should be. It's uneven, badly edited, wandering - like this review - and so on. But those are all low order bits compared to the beauty of the central idea, and the fact that the author actually tried to make a map of all his thoughts, and to document the experience.

[Stella]

This booklet was written in 1998 and with the whole note-making, linking and sharing boom, Zettlekasten, etc. going on now, it is literally decades ahead of its time, explaining the manual system before we had Obsidian, Roam, and even Evernote.

Absolutely impressive if totally unedited. (the author uses sentences such as "if I forget to talk about (this) later in the book... email me at ()

Thanks to this book, I learned that the word Wiki was coined in 1995, because the author used it and I was like, wait, this can't be from the nineties. It is.

Also, it looks like Kimbro was the first to use the term MOC (Maps of Content) in regards to his "index" like mapping of similar notes.

While largely irrelevant to those of us who use digital systems now, it is an interesting insight into how to effectively link your own thinking and notes as opposed to 'knowledge collecting'

[Alex Linschoten · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure whether to dismiss this outright or to say it's filled with really great ideas. A lot overlaps with Mark Bernstein's 'The Tinderbox Way' for me, and it seems Tinderbox as a programme is an ideal place to construct this kind of idea palace.

Some things to take away. You can get them (minus the stream-of-consciousness rambling) by reading the notes section of "Mind Performance Hacks" for the most part. Some of that section was even written by Kimbro, so you're getting the edited/considered version. If you were to properly adopt Kimbro's system you could quickly vanish down the rabbit hole, so to speak. Parts of it seem quite important to good information hygiene, though, and I will have to consider what's the best way to bring them in as part of my system.

[Trip · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book does what the title said, introducing a text system that can totally map out all of your thoughts.

How effective of this system? The more you read, the more you realize that the author isn't a good writer. The content was in disorder, even messy. He did acknowledge that he was not good with writing and was never finished any big project before. But with the help from this system, the book was born; since what he did was just take out the contents from the system, then reorganize and edit everything all together.

This book does contain information and knowledge to construct your own "servant", who will keep everything you wrote down. I believe it is worth the effort for reading since some hidden gems of note techniques were also buried inside.

[Nimish · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book a few years ago, and it was a wild read.

When you first read it, it feels like reading the random frenetic scribblings of someone who was typing freestyle at 3am. I'm pretty sure, in many ways, it was this.

But, then you see the incredible amount of structure and cohesion in the topics he's covering and the overall way those topics come together.

Somewhere in there (potentially in multiple places) he describes his method for writing this book was to simply take his notes and plop them down on the page... his 'outline' for the book was already sitting there in his notes. The only 'work' then was to actually write the parts of his outline. Those are the parts that feel and sound unpolished. The awesome outline was/is also unpolished but it just comes out as a result of the system.

Now, don't get me wrong, the system itself sounds completely untenable... it's basically having notebooks of notebooks of notebooks everywhere around you. But there are some really good pieces of advice in there from someone who actually took it that far and really did create a system for seeing all
of his thoughts and holding on to them.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite pieces of writing, all time.

The point isn't whether his system is useful, if there are aspects of it that we can incorporate into other systems, or even if detailed thought mapping is a worthwhile endeavor.

The point isn't what we can learn from it as a case study, although there's a lot there. Lion pushed the paper-based system to a local maxima, and describes a resulting feeling of paralysis that I think is fundamental to zettelkasten.

The true beauty of this book is that the way it is written - a completely unedited, stream of consciousness serialization of the part of his notebook system dedicated to itself - communicates more about how the system worked than any description of it ever could. It honestly makes me wonder how much our need for polish, for our writing to be perceived as "good" by others, holds us back from effective communication.

[Jan Schaller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eine Anleitung, wie man jeden Gedanken, den man denkt, kartieren kann. Ziemlich crazy Buch, was eher ein Gedankenstrom ist. War mir zu wirr, v.a. weil ich nicht vorhabe, das Anliegen des Buches in die Tat umzusetzen.

[Denis Vasilev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Тема интересная, но Smart Notes дали ответ качественнее и практичнее.

[izad]

REF: Encontrado en el artículo: "The complete guide to indexing your paper notes"

[Alex Linschoten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread this book. It remains extremely strange, but I'm glad I read it.