Commonplace Notes

Simon Willison describes the "the informal set of guidelines" for running a link blog. I mentioned in Welcome to my commonplace notes,

A commonplace book is a personal compilation of knowledge, ideas, quotations, and observations...from various sources for future reference and reflection.

In that sense, a commonplace notes is lot like a link blog. So guidelines that Simon mentions are applicable to anyone who keeps a commonplace notes or digital garden or by any other name they are called.

Simon mentions: having such notes is "low stakes, high value writing". Since you are only curating, the stakes are extremely low. It is an easy way to get started with blogging.

His guidelines are (I'm paraphrasing):

• Always include names of the people
• Add something extra. Pick out the key idea and highlight it or provide extra context or tie it together to other similar concepts

I have gone back and forth with keeping Twitter or Mastodon or Bluesky as a link blog. Since every social media platform eventually goes through enshitification, I decided to keep my blog itself as a commonplace notes.

I will try to follow Simon's guidelines.

I am not a cricket fan but have always admired Dhoni for his exceptional leadership skills in the IPL. He set high standards for his team and demanded even more from himself.

I have fancied myself in many situations like what Dhoni would behave. I've not gone wrong in those moments. So I listen to his interviews with great interest.

Recently he spoke with Eurogrip. He said,

If I play good cricket, I don't need PR.

Only a confident, skillful player can say that. As Dhoni says further in the interview, focusing on PR could become a distraction that drags your performance.

But Dhoni doesn’t just focus on his own game—he elevates the entire team. When you consistently deliver excellence, social media and PR naturally take a back seat.

His advice? Play the best game you can. Don’t worry too much about social media.

What stands out most is Dhoni’s humility. Toward the end of the interview, the host asked him about the best compliment he’s ever received. His response was classic Dhoni:

My wife saying you've done all right in life. That's a big compliment.

And goes on to say with a smile,

We all are trying to impress our wives

That is what I love about this man. He plays his best game—not for fame, not for accolades—but to impress his wife. That’s the kind of person I want to be.

The word scientific is thrown around a lot . But what is the scientific method?

Science Buddies explains it very well.

The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to explore observations and answer questions.

But it is not all or nothing. Surprisingly, scientific method can't be applied to all areas of science study.

scientists studying how stars change as they age or how dinosaurs digested their food cannot fast-forward a star's life by a million years or run medical exams on feeding dinosaurs to test their hypotheses.

But the basic steps remain the same:

1. Ask a Question
2. Do Background Research
3. Construct a Hypothesis
4. Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
5. Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
6. Communicate Your Results

These are my notes from the podcast, Identifying Legendary Start-ups with Josh Buckley. It is a masterclass on gaming as a mental-model for investing in startups. Josh talks about other aspects of investing in the podcast, but for this article, I have limited to "Gaming mental model."

# Gaming as a mental model

• gaming is one lens through which you can view products and companies
• all models are wrong, but some are useful
• This is not a complete model of the world, but certainly a useful one
• Launching a game is 1% of the work
• 99% of work happens post-launch

# Layers of successful games

• explore and optimize these three ideas to the extreme
• the game itself
  • only 30% of the game ecosystem
• community
  • chat room
  • a social network
  • a city within the internet
• shop
  • players spend hundreds, thousands, even millions of dollars on their lifetime

# Flow

• concept from psychology where it creates a sense of immersion where time, ego, and the world fades away
• best games bring you into the flow
• flow is synonymous with fun
• Flow is like ecstasy. It's exhilarating. Athletes call it the zone
• best games create controlled spaces that bring you into that sense of flow
• Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are games, in that sense; 3 billion people are playing them actively

# Elements that make games/apps tick

• Frequency
  • without frequency player get apathetic or bored and fall out of the flow
  • there has to be frequent feedback within the game
• variable outcomes
  • People adapt very quickly to a predictable reward schedule.
  • The term "maybe" is addictive, like nothing else out there.
• sense of control
  • People like to work. People like to work for reward.
  • To stay in the flow, you need some sense of challenge.
  • It's rewarding to build a piece of Ikea furniture

# Meta-game

• the abstraction layer above the game
• provides meaning to the game
• answers the question: why should you stay in that loop?
• it comes down to core human motivation.
• a hard problem to solve since context changes as the player goes through the game; you need to keep the player in flow even as the context changes
• people like to "belong" to a group
• they help their group progress, hit their goals to receive a sense of status from their peers
• meta-game for social media (Facebook/Twitter/Instagram)
  • they have a meta-game around identity, around social status.
  • follower count, high retweets, and perceived influence are examples of meta-game

# Shop

• free-to-play games don't charge a single price rather calibrate the payment according to the level of player's intensity
• only a small percentage of the players buy anything
• a subset (called whales) spend a large amount
• Power Law at work
• making a compelling game with built-in distribution is hard
• best games integrate the shop flow throughout the product. The game and the shop are one.
• players exhibit different characteristics as the context changes
• create different segments of the players and create different offers based on how they engage and spend
• players may hop through segments over time

# Portable idea from game design to business

• understand Power Laws
• understand customers in different segments and how much of your business is driven by the biggest segments;
• you probably don't understand these segments as well as you think
• you're probably underpricing that segment because you don't value the product nearly as they do.
• you probably don't understand how to build effectively for them, because either you don't love the product as much as they do or you don't derive as much value from it as they do
• you can't build a one-size-fits-all product
• There are so many different jobs to be done for a product
• Your product may be a Swiss army knife because you have 10 different segments or 5 different segments.
• each of those segments may both have different things they want from the product and they may have different importance to your own business.
• world is increasingly shifting to a more variable monetization model
• segments that may drive more than half your revenue, but maybe a small base of your customers or users are really important to understand.
• Twilio, where the pricing is usage-based, perfectly captures the power law

A commonplace book is a personal compilation of knowledge, ideas, quotations, and observations collected by an individual. It is a notebook or journal where one gathers and organizes information from various sources for future reference and reflection.  They are more like a database than a diary.

• Julie Fei-Fan Balzer.

You just read how commonplace notes are compiled and used. I'm interested in note taking as a learning tool. My notebooks - both physical and digital - are full of quotes from books I've read, dialogue from movies I've seen, and lyrics that resonate with me. Along with these compilations, I also note down lessons, observations, and questions.

The commonplace note isn't constrained by a theme like most blogs these days. It's got a variety of themes the author is into. This site is going to be a public version of my commonplace notes.

You will see notes on philosophy, theology, how we behave in groups, on learning, on technology's impact on business and vice versa, travel, stock market investing, and many other themes I am interested in from time to time. Primarily this site is part of my Self Guided Learning - I learn via writing.

As Charley Locke writes,

Keeping a commonplace book feels like a kinder way to grow, by wrestling with the articulations of others in the open...

These are my personal notes on my learning journey. I collect links, quotes, stories, and observations from various sources. These may or may not resonate with you.

There are many inspirations for this journey. There are many who blog everyday. Here are just four of them:

• Dan's Daily
• A Learning A Day
• Massimo Curatella
• Mike Crittenden

Since this is a self-development venture, I don't intend to post something just for the sake of posting.

If you are looking for historical examples, Wikipedia has a list of published commonplace books and notes.

If this journey interests you, please follow along. You can follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter or Bluesky.