No. 106 "Too much conflicting information" is not your future
No. 106 • 1/2/2025
Dear readers,
It feels like I've answered the question "What is a literature?" nearly a hundred fifty times. And, while I seriously do love answering it (and will do exactly that in the first class of Module 1 of my upcoming course), the fact that this question comes up in online forums nearly every week due to Too Much Conflicting Information is unfortunate.
And, it doesn't have to be that way.
"There's a ton of content out there about this system and how great it is, but so much of it is convoluted. Doto distills the important pieces and provides actionable insights." — August
Thanks, August!
Find a trusted source and get started
Earlier this year, my wife and a close friend bought a saw mill, as we live part time in the woods, and lumber is a resource we have in abundance. To be able to mill your own boards for siding, sheds, posts, beams, benches, boardwalk paths, bog bridges, and "dunnage" is...kinda awesome. And yet, neither my wife, my friend, nor I had ever run a saw mill before.
So, how did we mill a dozen 1x8x8 cedar boards (that go for upwards of $30 each in stores) without ever having previously laid hands on a saw mill?
First, here's what we didn't do. We didn't:
- Join every online forum and debate every old timer on how best to accommodate "kerf".
- Ask everyone online what their preferred workflow was in an effort to cobble together our own "system"
- Define our methodology for milling based on a productivity framework developed by a hobby sawyer
- Read every book on sawyering ahead of time in an effort to deduce the pros and cons of past sawyers before cutting our first log
Instead, we found one or two trusted sources (the saw mill's manual being one of them), put that intel to work, made some adjustments, and just...milled wood.
In other words, we got what we needed from a place we trusted and got working.
And, that's the approach I take in The System for Writing Master Course.
This course gives you a seriously solid foundation from a seriously solid teacher (Me!) on which to build your writing and knowledge work practice, so you can get started day one. Zero frills. Zero fluff. Everything I have to offer that I can fit into nine weeks will be offered.
Can Bobby be trusted?
In the last email I gassed myself up on all the ways I'm a capable and trusted teacher of this subject, so I won't bore you with all that. What I can say is this:
This course doesn't just teach you how to build and write with a zettelkasten (which it does very well, imho). It teaches you how to contextualize that practice among the many others out there so you can stop wallowing in Too Much Conflicting (and confusing) Information and get writing and discoursing with other writers.
It'll allow you to speak in any online writing or zettelkasten forum (maybe even the r/Zettelkasten subreddit [wink][wink]) with a cool, kind, and humble confidence. Your questions will be informed. Your answers will be informed. Your whole damn game will be informed.
- To learn more about the course as a whole, click here.
- To see an overview of the entire nine weeks, week-by-week, click here.
- To see all the offerings in one place AND learn about adding one-on-one consultations to your classwork, click here.
With love,
Bob
What I'm up to
- Milling cedar, pine, and red oak for future building projects, art projects, and woodland infrastructure projects
- Planning my 2025 property projects so I can orient all the above
- Working on a few new book ideas. In case you're curious, I always work on a handful at the same time. Whichever one seems to have the juju (i.e., gets me writing more) is the one I work on.
Get my book
Pick up my latest book, A System for Writing, [here].
Bonus poné
https://neal.fun/space-elevator/Got a question or something you'd like me to write about? Send me what you're thinking!