Many words have been said about digital gardens over the last few years.
Here are mine:
Every day I have new thoughts and ideas. Every day I learn new things, connect concepts together and (hopefully) cultivate a slightly deeper and richer understanding of the world I am immersed in.
My mind is a garden that I cultivate by living in the world, by letting in ideas, creating frameworks for understanding those ideas, testing those frameworks in reality to determine truth; and understanding my self, my goals and my emotions; and those of others. This happens intuitively and naturally as a byproduct of living. But the world of pure thought is a little murky.
A digital garden makes this process legible; both for me and others. Plucking ideas out of my mind, making them concrete and coherent and linking them to other ideas or concepts feels significant.
Paul Graham has a beautiful essay on the importance of putting ideas to words, where he mentions the following:
Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won’t just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that’s why I write them.
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The reason I’ve spent so long establishing this rather obvious point is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
It feels to them as if they do, especially if they’re not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you’ll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realise it.
I believe there is something very powerful about trying to put something you think you know into structured sentences that someone else can understand. Often, you very quickly realise that you don’t actually have a coherent take on things.
Writing helps you understand your ideas and thoughts better. It gives them clarity and substance. And it lets you share and remix them with others.
In digital gardening, we try to make legible our ideas, thoughts, opinions and experiences in a largely free-flowing way. It is a wiki of your mind, with interconnected links between various thoughts and ideas. Every garden is unique because every person is unique.