Tags
Creating new and useful thoughts, Reading, Remembering, thinking, Useful means productive, Writing
Cicero the Classic Roman wrote – Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.
I would rewrite Cicero’s statement about reading by replacing the word reading with writing.
Write at every wait; write at all hours; write within leisure; write in times of labor; write as one goes in; write as one goes out. The task of the educated mind is simply put – write to give to the world the produce of your thoughts.
My position is that taking something into one’s mind and physical control has little or no value to the world at large and little impact on one’s own self. If the item isn’t put into some external form, it is useless and vanishes when the brain is occupied with more immediate problems, forgets through natural processes or dies totally when the body dies. When externalized it can be recalled and used more easily, not only by the public, but one’s self. Very little of what an individual takes in, in the form of reading or anything else, ever comes back out into the world in a useful form.
Writing something down, especially in an indexable form as is now done on a computer, makes it more easily available, and more used and thus more valuable. Notebooks were the tool of the past, but now it is the portable keyboard, and now on a screen, and perhaps with GoogleGlass it will be possible to record everything that one encounters and index it, and post it even more easily. Thus we will soon be inundated with everyone’s mental and physical garbage, but with Google indexing and screening there will soon be an abundance of amazing new things. Audio record everything and whenever something significant happened say “BINGO” and then have a program that would search your daily recording for the key word and convert to text the previous sentence or two. That would give one a quick memory of what happened and permit you to amplify the idea into its more developed and comprehensible form at a later time when recalled to screen.