Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #16. Map Your Mind

Collecting and connecting related ideas reveal patterns that stimulate new thought, as well as contradictions to be resolved.

Are your thoughts organized? Most of the time, people live in a river of thoughts and sensations, like the story line of a movie. Our thoughts arrive as events in a sequence.

But we can map out our thoughts on a plane. When we see them side by side, we can compare them with one another and organize them. Observing the whole picture, all at once, we make startling realizations and discover an order to our thoughts, a top-down understanding of them.¹

Alternatively, we find a disorder, and gain insight into tensions and confusions in our life. As soon as we see them clearly, though, our mind starts cranking away, working to resolve them—or, at the very least, to understand the subtlety behind the tension.

In Action

Mind mapping begins with collecting thoughts into a source list: a list of ideas you start out with and that you're going to map. It's useful to separate assembling your mind map from collecting your source ideas.

Creating the source list

Your source list can come from free writing, from a catch [Hack #13], or even from a chat transcript. What's necessary is to turn the source into a list.

Let's start with free writing. Think of a subject you think about a lot. Situate yourself in front of a keyboard, close your eyes, and then type out everything that comes to you about the subject. You can try to focus on one topic, or fan out ...