If you’re foolish enough to pursue a doctorate, expect to spend a substantial portion of your time reading. I can’t recall any reading list from my course work that wasn’t multiple pages worth of classic books and journal articles.
One of our core courses was labeled simply as “Doctoral Reading Seminar”. Each week a half dozen of us would meet with Professor McKenney who oversaw our program. One week one of us was whining about the workload (it’s possible I might have been the one whining). McKenney’s observation was that this time was a luxury we might want to contemplate appreciating rather than dreading. It was the last time for a long time when our only goal was to invest in building our base of intellectual capital. Eventually I learned that it was more fruitful to work out why McKenney was right rather than whether he was.
This all took place nearly forty years ago. The technological infrastructure of 1986 bore little resemblance to what we take for granted today. I offer that as a weak excuse for my failure to fully think through what McKenney was trying to knock into our heads.
The persistent mistake I made then and continue to wrestle with is to think that this base of intellectual capital is something that exists solely inside your head. What I observed was more experienced players (professors, students ahead of us in the program, my cohort of doctoral candidates) rattling off references and supporting arguments off the top of their heads. If there were tricks of the trade, they weren’t evident to me.
I still have most of my notes from those days. I even built a small system to help me track the bibliographic information about my reading (I couldn’t afford any of the handful of programs then available). But all my notes were handwritten. That was sufficient to what I understood the task to be. To get the knowledge into my head and to be ready to hand as I developed the deliverables I was expected to turn out (and turn in).
Life took me back into a consulting career after I finished by doctorate. I went back to a world of clients and deliverables. Ironically, I ended up responsible for knowledge management in my organization. But deliverables remained the driving construct in my thinking. While I’ve tried to argue for the importance of a certain degree of laziness in knowledge work, the reality is that when client deadlines loom I am more likely to “power through” than to worry about being clever or thinking about the long run.
But a collection of on time and on budget deliverables doesn’t add up to a body of work. Nor does a body of work equal an intellectual capital base. They are related but conceptually distinct. This is an aspect of the hype around notes and note-making I am only now beginning to grasp.
I know how to work backwards from an understanding of the end result. Understand the deliverable and you can lay out the path to travel to get there. Once you have a path, you can identify intermediate waystations.
Learning to walk the path as you create it is a different skill. One that it turns out I am still learning.
“Creating the path as you walk it” is beautifully put. In terms of Zettelkasten/note-taking, I usually emphasize to have a productive process first, because you cannot know the deliverables at all times. I did fail to put into words how this can be confusing or even terrifying, because that means you don’t know where you are going and if the direction is a path worth taking!