In the previous chapter, we covered the how unearned structure never works. In this chapter, we focus on the 1,000 ideas you have around you at any given time.

How do you interact with ideas? With knowledge? Are these odd questions? Or are they just hard to answer?

The brilliant book "The Extended Mind" by Annie Murphy Paul gives us a clearer picture of the answers. We don't just interact with ideas in our minds, but in our body, our environment, and in our relationships. It's a realization that is at once deeply profound and surprisingly...obvious (Paul explains this in her book, which is a must-read).

So what do we call the space where we interact with ideas? That question becomes even more difficult. A handwritten journal? That's too limiting; it doesn't cover even half of an extended mind. A "second brain"? That's a great term, and probably the best term to describe the thoughts we capture externally (digitally and on paper).

But what about other thoughts? You know, thought thoughts? What about the thoughts we have in the shower...or while hiking a mountain...or when talking with a friend...or while standing in line at the grocery store?

There is no good, existing term to describe the totality of the space where we interact with ideas. I've looked. I've come up empty. So I'm proposing one...

"Ideaverse"

What is an Ideaverse?

An ideaverse is the 1,000 ideas you have around you at any given time.

• It is all the spaces in your life where you encounter and express ideas.
• It is the totality of ideas that exist between you and every place you think.
• It is the swirl of thoughts and ideas you can readily access wherever you currently find yourself.
• It is the space between your brain, your body, and every part of your environment—your personal notes, the tree you walked by, the conversation you just had, and even the jolt of butterflies you just felt in your stomach.

To repeat: An ideaverse is the 1,000 ideas you have around you at any given time.

Think of the 1,000 ideas in the same way as the Tao Te Ching refers to "Ten Thousand Things"—as basically too many things to count. It is one, it is two, and it is many.

And yet 1,000 is a good number to keep in mind. Especially for our digital notes. For systems to hit a critical mass where they really take on emergent behavior—i.e. you are connecting the dots and making leaps of insights—they need to hit a certain number first. This isn't an exact science, so 1,000 ideas becomes the number to aspire towards.

I can hear the counter-pointers say, "All you really need are 10 good ideas", and then the super-counter-pointers going further and saying, "Nay! All you need is one!" They are not wrong, they are just missing the main point about emergent thinking: You can't make leaps of insights, if you don't have any dots to connect.

The ideas within "The Extended Mind" carry piercing implications about the interaction between ourselves and our environments. It connects to a long-held belief of mine, which we can summarize with our next Idea Rule:

Even when you realize your environment is shaping you, it's still shaping you more than you realize.

What if we could reliably shape a part of our extended environment, so it in turn, could reliably reshape us?

Can you make a digital ideaverse?

When it comes to your digital notes, you can externalize parts of your ideaverse into digital form. You may choose to think of it as a second brain. Or you may choose to think of it as the digital extension of your ideaverse. The outcome will basically be the same.

My linked notes are the most valuable part of my digital ideaverse.

This is the single, most powerful digital place where we have the power to dependably manage our knowledge. That's why there is an entire field dedicated to this pursuit: Personal Knowledge Management.

Personal Knowledge Management, or PKM, is the process of creating, sharing, using and managing knowledge and information." Or again, as I like to stress, personal knowledge management is really about the process of making sense of the world. Sense-making. How do we make sense of the world? Now that's a thread that once you start pulling, it unravels all sorts of juicy questions. Questions like:

• ‍What should I do in this world?
• How should I conduct myself?
• Where should I spend my limited amount of attention?
• What really matters?

If we decide these existential questions are fundamental to a "life worth living", then we better have a way of dealing with all the STUFF—you know, the intangible ether of ideas—the stuff that surrounds all of our waking, living, breathing moments.

Once we accept that we have a world of ideas and inputs swirling around us—and that this world is influenced by the stuff we encounter—and that we can create a digital extension of our ideaverse—we might start asking: "What makes for a healthy ideaverse?"

Properties and Conditions of an Ideaverse

A healthy ideaverse is one that is effective, reliable, and sustainable. Here is a working list of properties and conditions to consider when assessing the health of your entire thinking system:

• ‍Populated: Is it populated (you can't make something from nothing)? What is it populated with? How varied, diverse, and random is it?
• ‍Connected: How easy is it for you to make connections? From the new to the known? From new experiences to existing memories?
• ‍Clustered: How easy is it for you to cluster ideas together? Can you easily gather relevant ideas into a single place so you can work with them and string them together into something remarkable?
• ‍Personal: Are your ideas able to be expressed in your own words?
• ‍Available: Are your ideas easily accessible to you? Can you quickly access what you want to remember? How reliably can you retrieve your saved knowledge?
• ‍Safe: How safe are your thoughts and ideas from being lost?

Our ideaverse is much larger than just our notes. And yet, our notes carry an outsized impact on who we become and what we think next.

This interplay between part of our ideaverse is endlessly fascinating, and in fact, it inspired future scientific research.

What's this? I'm getting a fax from the future right now ;)

Neuroscience from the future proves the power of a linked ideaverse

The future research hooked up someone—maybe you—working in your digital ideaverse and they noticed something crazy. Your brain activity was lighting up uncharacteristically. Not only was your brain signature showing signs of someone in Flow (specific networks of the brain firing), they found something even more surprising once they slowed down the footage.

Your brain patterns were rapidly alternating between different modes:

• scatterfocus: loose, undirected thinking
• hyperfocus: deep, concentrated thinking
• improvisation: spontaneous, lateral, creative
• criticality: analytical, critical thinking

At full speed, your brain looked like an audiogram bouncing to the music of an invisible, organic beat.

Researchers won't have a term for this a rare brain pattern, and yet, working in one's linked digital notes seemed to be most reliable way to activate it. So they will have to create one. The early phrase being used is Matrix Mode, alluding to the movie that came out 30 years earlier.

But something even stranger happened.

The interns accidentally forgot to unplug you after you finished working on your digital notes, so their machines kept recording your brain functions. They couldn't believe what they found, and even had to make sure their scanners weren't broken.

Your brain stayed in Matrix Mode long after you stopped working in your digital notes!

Here is a quote from their findings: "Spending time in a participant's digital notes—barring that they were linked—was shown to supercharge their mind for hours after. In this way, we see parallels between what "note-making" does to our minds to what charging does to our digital devices."

Research is ongoing on this profound phenomenon: your brain won't just be fired up like that while using your digital notes, but your active repetitions engaging with digital notes, weren't just making changes in your digital notes, but they were happening in your brain—firing and creating new networks that continue to connect, fire, grow, and emerge long after any work. (This is quite different from Gamer's Brain, which alarmingly loses brain activity after the game is shut off.)

The implication of this is mind-altering (literally).

We can use the digital parts of our ideaverse to activate, enrich, and grow the parts of the ideaverse between our two ears.

An Evocative Idea

The idea that we each have an ideaverse that we can shape is an evocative one. We start asking questions. Questions like: "Is mine any good?" and "What can I do to make mine better?"

• First, look at where you spend most of your day physically.
• Next, look at where you spend most of your day mentally.

That's where the LYT Workshop can help. It helps you create your own powerful knowledge system—so you can do your most inspired work, more often.

The health of your ideaverse affects every part of your existence.

To encourage this paradigm-shift, here is a free downloadable PDF titled "Into The Ideaverse".

That's why my theme for this year is the "Rise of the Ideaverse". I want to help everyone recognize and improve how they interact with the ideas they encounter.

What does your ideaverse look like? How will you improve yours this year?