Positives

Even though My Excerpts is currently a website that only I can use, I’ve always imagined making it available to everyone in the future, that’s my goal. For that reason, I thought it would be a good idea to list some of the positives I see it having, to outline the reasons why I started this project in the first place in the hope that others may understand its use and it may become something bigger.

1. A home and archive for all your excerpts – The notes you’ve taken from what you’ve read, listened to or watched all in one place and you’ll also be able to organise your archive over time by author, date, medium, subject, etc. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a platform with a record of everything that really spoke to you?

2. My – This is a key part of the name. It’s a personal distillation of something you’ve experienced, what you’ve taken away from it, no one else. It’s very subjective and dependent on many factors such as who you are, what you’re doing and what you’re thinking.

3. Focus, be present – You’ll be able to focus your attention and concentration on doing one thing at a time, something which will become increasingly important in a world with a growing number of distractions. Doing this will make it easier to digest, learn from and take action so that excerpts could become future ideas and projects.

4. Skills – You’ll also hone your curating and editing skills, working from larger bodies of work and reducing them only to what resonated with you. Equally this will become increasingly useful as we are confronted with more and more content and what feels like less and less time.

5. Public / private and shareable – My Excerpts could be made to function as public or private depending on the user’s preference and share posts. An example that normally comes to mind is that of a journalist reviewing a book or a film, taking notes and sharing them privately with their editor or posting them publicly for their readers.

6. Structure – Writing a post will be easy and straightforward thanks to a set structure of compulsory and optional fields. After choosing the medium, you then fill in the title, the quote and finally any personal thoughts or actions.

7. Effective – It doesn’t take long to write notes on paper or type them on a phone, tablet or laptop but their use and effectiveness can be very low if they’re only stored. By actively taking time to type and think about them, it will increase the chances of those ideas being assimilated and potentially lead to something else.

8. Discovery – My Excerpts could serve as a way of discovering and learning about new ideas and information. Imagine being able to follow what your favourite people have taken away from a particular book, film, podcast, talk, etc.?

9. Reflection – I recently read a post on Farnam Street about Schopenhauer on reading which I thought was very relevant to this blog and also highlights a positive. Reflection to allow ideas to sink in.

[…] it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read if one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.