I really enjoy reading. I might even enjoy more the act of walking and listening to something I would otherwise be reading. My Dad infused this excitement for learning in me from a young age. Perhaps it was always there in my DNA, but I think one of the most impactful gifts a parent can bestow upon a child is the enthusiasm for learning new things, whether it is a new skill, concepts, information or mode of thinking. Most children first experience learning in the context of school and as a result learning feels like work and something you are forced to do. Many of my friends only enjoyed learning once it was no longer forced upon them, which can also sometimes coincide with a change of learning environment (learning applied to a job feels very different from work in school). However, I first experienced learning in the context of my Dad’s excitement for the world around him. He told me he couldn’t wait for me to read because then I would be able to do all the things he could do, and the entire world would open up to me, that I was only seeing a small sliver of it right now and that there were so many great things to experience, but that reading was the key. Learning wasn’t an obligation, it was an exciting new chapter in my life. My first trip as a child was not to Disney World, but to Constitution Hall (which had just opened at the time). The excitement of the new has always coincided with learning from the very beginning.

One of the peculiar outcomes of finding great joy in learning is my near obsession with taking notes. I love consuming new information, but it bothers me when I retain very little. Of course, consumed information unretained turns into pure entertainment, but I’ve found that when I take notes, the mere act of writing helps solidify the information somewhere in my brain, even if I never see the notes gain. People who find themselves with this desire to document, note take, and record are not quite tortured souls, but they do always feel the phantom loss of a key phrasing or piece of information doomed to wherever forgotten memories go. Ever since I was young, I have been taking notes on books and articles. My childhood bedroom is replete with pages loose leaf paper folded between book covers, bearing the handwriting that has not seemed to evolve past the 9th grade.

It is a practice I still hold today. Every non-fiction book I read has a section in my notes app. Podcasts quotes are thrown into the app as well. But for some reason, I always felt like the man in the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough to Last.” Never enough time to record all the things I want. More importantly, my notes lacked connective tissue. My brain made the requesite links between notes, but my corpus of information was far greater than my brain had the ability to search, recall, and connect to a relevant topic.

It was for this reason that I fell in love with Roam when it first launched. The best way to describe Roam is that it is a tool that when used correctly, can function as your digital brain. It is a repository of whatever information you would like to record, but most importantly it allows you to create two way linking of…anything. You can infinitely nest ideas, quotes, words, names, anything you choose.

For example, if you use a quote in multiple disparate pages in your Roam network, you can make that quote an atomic unit in your network of ideas. You can quite literally visualize every single time you have used that quote in your writing. Any time a concept, like “survivorship bias” is used in your writing, you can tag it and then immediately have access to everything you’ve ever written that about, related to, or containing that topic. There are many more powerful ways to use Roam, but the way I think about it enables you to document and track the connections you make between different concepts, ideas, and pieces of information, just like your brain does sometimes consciously and often unconsciously.

It is an immensely powerful tool that I fell in love with, and then quite cold turkey. I may come back to it one day. But the reason I shut it down was that I found myself building up my Roam network for the sake of doing so. I became so fixated on building connections between ideas and documenting the threads going across my brain that the act of doing it became what I optimized for, rather than the fun of learning. I found myself taking notes on things that I normally would never take notes on, and sometimes even found myself stressed, like I would be letting myself down if I did not take notes on a certain piece of work.

This phenomenon is what I call the Intellectual Hedonic Treadmill. In the same way that people lose touch with their underlying reason for being when they feel like they are only one purchase away from fulfillment, I felt like I was driven by a desire to build up an ever greater corpus of information. I was fully divorced from the reason I had taken notes in the first place.

So I quit. Part of this was that I started a company. When you start a company, you really don’t have time for that level of information consumption anymore, let alone documentation, especially if it is unrelated to your business. The stress of starting a business also means that a lot of the information you do consume while building is actually information you retain. Your engagement and focus is just on a different level, and for that reason, you soak things up.

I may come back to Roam one day. But for now, I still take notes, but only when something really strikes me as worthy of a note. I don’t have a framework for what may be worthy and what isn’t. I trust my gut on what is exciting and interesting, and let that guide me.