#06: 📚 Build a body of work

Make your work more valuable over time

Hi there! I’m Mike Tannenbaum, the human behind this letter. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to updates at https://refinedmind.co. The Refined Mind is a bi-weekly review of public notes and ideas in progress designed to encourage discussion.

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Hi friends!

When I started publishing my notes one of the first was about building a body of work. Hilariously, it was 5 bullet points about “why” and 14 bullet points about “how.”

Not very helpful.

Fast forward to February 2021 and the note finally has more narrative content to it, which is good news because there are 16 mentions of [[build a body of work]] found throughout The Refined Mind notes, so it’s an important piece to have written.

When you consistently produce work you believe in—creative work that’s fueled by intrinsic motivation as opposed to external forces—the volume of work grows and becomes more and more valuable over time.

As you’ll see below there are many other updates to the site, especially in context of my digital ecosystem.

I’ve also been thinking about America, America’s inability to care for its own citizens, and even some quick thoughts about the future of education.

Knowing how to think, how to create, and how to socialize are perhaps the penultimate skills of our lives, second only to knowing how to learn.

Remember, this site is about thinking in public so most (all) of these notes are works in progress, are 100% incomplete, and probably wrong.

Part of the reason for sharing all this is to get feedback to both improve over time and learn unexpected things. I’ll encourage you to leave your thoughts as comments on any posts you read/skim through.

And of course, if you enjoy this, clicking the little ♡ below will be incredibly helpful.

With that, enjoy the changelog! Thanks so much for you supporting this project. It’s a ton of fun to build and knowing people actually enjoy exploring the garden motivates me to keep it going.

Enjoy your weekend and see you on the internet,

Mike Tannenbaum | The Refined Mind

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2021-02-01 — Building a body of work

Added

• Added Buy Me A Coffee link to the footer

Updated

• Finally wrote something real about why to build a body of work.

Building a body of work is an act of compounding, which might be one of the most powerful forces we have as humans.

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2021-01-29 — More on American inequality

Added

• America has done a terrible job taking care of its citizens

• The future is not American-led

Updated

• America

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2021-01-19 — Obsidian, Roam Research, and note updates

Added

• Obsidian is for tending my digital garden

The tool is designed for  and automatically connects notes with one another to help you build out your web of thinking by writing similarly to how we think: non-linearly.

• Newsletter signup form on notes pages

Updated

• Renamed My new design system to my digital ecosystem and totally reworked the note

After much experimentation and exploration of new practices and tools, I’ve made significant improvements to my learning and knowledge management system. It’s considered a work in progress, however, as it’s always being iterated on and improved as my needs evolve and change.

• Added products I love to Tools for managing information overload and improving how we think are on the rise

These tools can help you go from idea capture to new thing created if you use them effectively.

• Renamed “How to take smart notes” to “How I take smart notes” because I can only share what works for me, not what others should do

Taking notes is about collecting information and ideas in this moment, and making them available for our future selves to act upon. We’re seeding ideas now and helping them grow stronger as we explore and learn new things.

• Drafts is for immediate note capture and works in progress

Instead of having a thought and then thinking “where do I want to put this?”—and then having to think about what app to open, the only concern is immediately capturing the thought. BAM. done.

• Evernote is for long-term storage

The content in Evernote is interacted with less frequently, but is housed in a trustworthy place. It’s a great place to store things that need to be recalled on occasion but aren’t interacted with regularly.

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2021-01-10 — Rethinking education models

• Added

  • When you have the world of information available at your fingertips, traditional models of education are rendered obsolete