We're close to the end of the State of PKM. I hope this email series is leaving you with a clearer and empowered sense of how you can improve your knowledge management efforts.

Want to think better?

Then create spaces that make good thinking easy.

Last chapter, we covered how you can create Maps of Content (MOCs).

But there is another part to the equation.

You need others.

It's funny though: we don't like to think we need anyone.

Call it "American Individualism" if you want. In western culture we have this crazy notion that we have to be able to "go it alone".

It's a bunch of hogwash.

Here's the hard truth I had to tell myself not too long ago:

"Nick, your desire to be independent—a lone wolf—is harming everything about your life: your relationships, your career, and your love of learning new things."

The benefits of interdependance over independance have always been true. But it's become even more true in the Information Age. If you are pridefully clinging to your independence, you are asking to get left behind.

Instead of getting left behind, how can we thrive?

How can we make our efforts a better, faster, and more joyful experience?

Find people who are trying to do what you are doing.

And talk with them...

How to learn the invisible stuff

If we truly want to get better, we have to talk.

There is so much you are missing out from just reading articles.

You just can't learn the secret sauce—the difficult to express knowledge that psychologists call "tacit knowledge"—from just the written word.

Research from Christopher Myers at Johns Hopkins University suggests that one way we can learn the hidden, nitty-gritty details of something is to have spaces where we can talk with peers about our shared efforts and experiences.

This tacit knowledge—often in the form of personal wisdom, experience, insight, and intuition—is highly valuable, but extremely difficult to express and extract.

Your best bet? Seek ways to get richly contextualized information full of detail and nuance:

• Listen to someone using their voice to make a point.
• Use your arms to describe something.
• Talk to others about what you are thinking.

Is it just me, or does this sound super obvious?

It is.

But then why—when it comes to us trying to learn something we really care about—are we not doing the most obvious things?!

• Do you want to get better at managing your knowledge?
• Do you want to build a lifelong system to remember and think better?
• Does it really matter to you?

Then you must find people like you to talk with!

You have to join the room where it happens.

And if you are using linked notes, that room is the LYT Workshop.

It just is.

It's the live, interactive sessions. It's the live sensemaking sessions. It's the questions, the answers, the sharing, and the fast feedback. It's the interactions online. It's the showcases from your peers. It's the sharing and giving of the alumni and students.

It's the community of people all trying to figure out their unique solutions to all of our similar problems.

If you really want to improve, you have to improve your environment.

And the best way to do that is to figure out how to surround yourself with people working on the same issues you are.

Faster and further together

Nothing beats live moments where you can raise your hand and say:

"Wait a sec. What did you just do? Why that? Why not this?"

Those subtle moments make the difference between moving fast in the wrong direction, and moving far in the right one.

There is a phrase out there that goes: "Faster alone, further together."

I like that phrase. We do go farther together.

But the first part of the phrase is even worse than it suggests.

Alone, you can move faster—but where to?

To paraphrase my hall of fame college coach:

"It doesn't matter how fast you are, if you're going the wrong way."

In our final chapter, we'll cover what it might look like to move faster and farther in the right direction...